A United Nations expert called this week for an international investigation into a range of "atrocity crimes" committed in Iran in connection with a purge of dissidents in the 1980s. Most of the victims were part of a group now based in France and Albania, in a sometimes uneasy relationship with the West.
Javaid Rehman, the UN’s independent special rapporteur on the rights situation in Iran, said there should be "no impunity for such gross human rights violations, regardless of when they were committed".
His 66-page report focuses on "grave human rights violations" that took place in the Islamic Republic in 1981-1982 and in 1988, comprising "summary, arbitrary and extrajudicial executions of thousands of arbitrarily imprisoned political opponents".
It spotlights alleged extrajudicial executions of thousands of mainly young people across Iranian prisons within a few months in the summer of 1988, just as the war with Iraq was ending, an episode described as a "shocking tale of brutality".
Those killed were mainly supporters of the People's Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), a group Iranian authorities consider a terrorist organisation. At the time, the PMOI was given shelter and heavy weaponry by Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
A history of revolt
The PMOI is known by a variety of names, including Mujaheddin-e-Kalkh (MEK) or "People's Mujaheddin", alongside its political wing the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).
The organisation was founded in 1965 and, according to human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, author of a 2009 study on Tehran's persecution of the MEK, the movement "had taken its politics from Karl Marx, its theology from Islam, and its guerrilla tactics from Che Guevara".
"It had fought the Shah and supported the revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, but later broke with his theocratic state and took up arms against it, in support (or so it now says) of democracy," Robertson writes.
Khomeini toppled the regime of Iran's Shah in 1979 and, according to Robertson, did not want to have anything to do with the MEK and like-minded groups. A period of struggles, bomb attacks, waves of arrests and executions followed.
The group's current leader is Maryam Rajavi, wife of the group's founder Massoud Rajavi, who disappeared in 2003. It is not known if he is still alive.
Meanwhile, Iran holds the MEK responsible for the Haft-e Tir bombing on the regime's party headquarters on 28 June 1981, which killed more than 70 government officials.
It also blames it for the bombing of the Iranian prime minister's office two months later, which killed Prime Minister Bahonar, President Mohammad Ali Rajai and six other Iranian government officials.
Overall, authorities attribute some 17,000 deaths to MEK attacks over the past four decades, a figure that is regularly repeated by Iran's state-controlled media.
The MEK in turn maintains – now with the backing of the UN findings – that Iranian authorities have killed thousands of members of their organisation, following arrests that continue to this day.
Exile in France
After the United States drove out Saddam Hussein from Iraq in the early 2000s, MEK rebels remained concentrated in a refugee camp near Baghdad until Washington pulled out its troops.
Earlier, the group's political wing, the NCRI, had found shelter in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town outside Paris, where members reside in a walled compound in an uneasy relationship with the French government.
The remaining rebels and their families were moved to Albania.
The members of MEK have often been surrounded by controversy, and the relationship between the NCRI and Paris is complex. After being on US and EU-level terrorist lists for years, the organisation relentlessly lobbied a broad range of public figures, including journalists, ministers, mayors and politicians, and managed to clear its name.
Meanwhile, Tehran and the rebels continue to attack each other, but the struggle moved outside Iran proper. In 2018, the NCRI gathering, then held in the Villepinte convention centre outside Paris, was the target of a suspected bomb plot involving local operatives and the Vienna-based diplomat Assadollah Assadi, who was later sentenced to 20 years in prison as the "mastermind".
He was released last year in exchange for Belgian humanitarian worker Olivier Vandecasteele, who was held in an Iranian prison for more than a year on charges of espionage.
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Iran on the defensive
The MEK welcomed the UN's report, which appears to add weight to its long-standing accusations against the Iranian government.
As a rule, Iran flatly rejects any criticism of its human rights record.
Responding to a fact-finding mission by Rehman in 2022, aimed at investigating the aftermath of mass protests and alleged human rights violations, the secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, Kazem Gharibabadi, declared that the UN's report contained a "repetition and legitimisation of baseless claims that have been raised repeatedly in the anti-Iranian media and from the platforms of some Western governments, and it lacks any documented source".
In the same breath, Gharibabadi invoked the MEK and attacked western countries like France that "have supported terrorists who have taken the lives of more than 17,000 innocent people in Iran, including women and children, and have harboured them in their own lands".
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Albanian base
After US troops started to leave Iraq in late 2007, the pressure from Baghdad on MEK to leave the country mounted. In 2013, American and UN diplomats arranged for the MEK to purchase land in Albania, where they opened a camp that is now officially home to some 2,500 members.
But Iran kept a close guard, vilifying the camp and their Albanian hosts.
A rare visit by the New York Times to the camp in 2020 painted a picture of a rather desperate group that operates in extreme secrecy and fear, in spite of the relative distance from Iran.
Tensions rose again last year, when according to cybersecurity watchdog Mandiant, Tirana suspended diplomatic ties with Iran after it found that Tehran had staged cyberattacks against Albania, apparently to show its discontent over the presence of the MEK.
Iran also accuses the group of holding members against their will, which they deny.
