Twenty-four centuries ago, Alexander the Great invaded Persepolis.
We speak of it as it happened yesterday. We remember of the heroes of
that era: Aryo-Barzan, the brave Persian commander who fought to the death at
the head of his Khaledoon Brigade but failed to check Alexander’s advance after
48 days of fighting; and a local village headman who betrayed his homeland by
guiding the invading Macedonians through the mountains to the rear of
Aryo-Barzan’s lines. That was how Alexander managed to defeat the Iranians and
subjugate the Persian Empire.
We judge, and do so extremely harshly with those
deemed to have joined the enemy at crucial points in time. Even their names are
not mentioned; they are only referred to as traitors.
While the invaders
themselves men like Alexander, Genghis, Hulagu and Teimour have gradually
gained acceptance by Iranians, those who aided and abetted them have not. They
are still referred to as traitors who helped the foreign invaders gain access
to the Iranian heartland.
It has to be said that there were not many traitors
in Iranian history. Yet in the years following World War I, and with the advent
of the Communist Party and other left-wing and Islamist political movements,
the concept of treachery lost its significance under the weight of different
ideologies. It was Tudeh, the Iranian communist group, that first introduced
the idea that “the party’s interests precede those of the homeland” into the
Iranian political lexicon. What this idea meant in practice was that Tudeh
leaders and cadres had become a fifth column for Soviet intelligence.
When,
under the shah, Iranian military intelligence caught active communist cells in
the Iranian armed forces, arrested communist officers testified that they
believed giving secret documents to the KGB was a patriotic act, since they
were helping the Soviet Union in its struggle against world imperialism. A
Soviet victory, the Iranian communist officers believed, would liberate
countries like Iran from the shackles of colonialism that were holding them
back.
This concept was not abandoned with the fall of the shah; at the height
of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war under Iran’s Islamic regime, Captain Bahram
Afzali, the Iranian Navy’s commander in chief, and eight other senior officers
were arrested for providing the director of the local KGB station with a large
number of secret documents over many years.
Before he was shot for treason,
Afzali said he had agreed to hand over the secret documents to the KGB after
having been convinced by Tudeh first secretary Noureddine Kianuri that the
United States was plotting to prolong the war, and that the Soviet Union could
bring it to an end if only it had more information about Iranian military
plans.
When, after fleeing Iran in 1981, Mujahideen-e-Khalq leader Masoud
Rajavi signed a peace agreement with then Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz, he
justified his action by saying the resistance (i.e. his organization) was the
legitimate representative of the Iranian people and was thus authorized to sue
for peace with Iraq.
Yet former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr (who was
Rajavi’s erstwhile ally, besides being his father-in-law), who had fled along
with him to Paris in 1981, considered Rajavi’s action to be treasonous. Not
only did he break with the Mujahideen leader, but his daughter Firouzeh
divorced Rajavi as well.
When Rajavi decided to relocate to Iraq together with
his followers, it transpired that Bani-Sadr’s fears that the Mujahideen would
become subservient to Iraq were well founded.
Rajavi committed political
suicide by choosing Iraq as a base for his organization at a time when Iraqi
missiles were raining on Iranian cities, and Iraqi chemical weapons were
killing thousands of Iranian soldiers and civilians. Despite the fact that he
formed an armed force (called the Army of National Liberation) with hundreds of
tanks, guns and modern helicopter gunships (courtesy of the Iraqi Army), and
despite having a strong propaganda machine, Rajavi failed to cultivate support
for his organization inside Iran. In fact, his insistence on being the sole
alternative to the Iranian regime was one of the main reasons why the regime
survived.
Domestically, fear of the possibility that Rajavi would seize power
should the regime fall was an important reason why widespread disaffection and
anger among the Iranian population did not spill over into a mass revolt like
it did back in 1979.
It now seems that the association between the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq and the Iraqi regime is not a marriage of convenience.
Rajavi’s men had been incorporated into the Iraqi Army and intelligence forces.
In the Iraqi uprising of 1991, Rajavi’s men played a prominent role in
subjugating Shiites and Kurds. They donned Iranian uniforms and infiltrated
Shiite towns as liberators but soon initiated a war of genocide against the
Shiites. In the north, they fought side by side with the Iraqi Army against the
Kurds.
Even though they lacked popular support inside Iran, the Mujahideen
nevertheless managed despite Mohammad Khatami’s resounding victory in the
presidential election of 1997, in which voters largely ignored Rajavi’s call
from Baghdad to boycott the poll to maintain their position as the only
credible alternative to the Islamic regime.
President’s Khatami’s victory,
however, was bad news for Rajavi’s group. Within two years, the United States
(followed by Britain and the European Union) named the Mujahideen-e-Khalq as a
pro-Iraq terrorist organization. Its offices in London, Washington and other
cities were closed down. Rajavi’s hopes of addressing the United Nations one
day (like Nelson Mandela and other Third World leaders of the 1960s did) thus
went up in smoke.
The Mujahideen’s fate will not be any better than that of its
Iraqi sponsors. In fact, Iraq has already ditched the organization in exchange
for better relations with Iran in these critical times.
According to sources in
the Iranian presidency, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein wrote a letter to Khatami
(which Foreign Minister Naji Sabri delivered on Feb. 9) offering several
concessions, including delineating the border between the two countries, going
back to the 1975 Treaty of Algiers and giving the Iraq-based Mujahideen a
choice between returning to Iran and relocating to a third country.
With Even Saddam
gone, Rajavi’s place in Iranian history looks secure together with that
village headman who betrayed his country to Alexander the Great 2,400 years
ago.
