US confirms protected status for Iranian opposition forces in Iraq

Agence France Presse
July 26, 2004
BY MATTHEW LEE

WASHINGTON, July 26 - The United States on Monday confirmed it had granted protected status to nearly 4,000 members of the People's Mujahedeen, Iran's main armed opposition group, now confined to a military-run camp in Iraq.

The State Department stressed, however, that the move, which drew a warning from Tehran, has no effect on the US "foreign terrorist organization" designation for the group, also known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) or National Council of Resistance of Iran.

"The 3,800 members of the MEK that are in (Camp) Ashraf have been granted protected persons status," deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said, adding that the move gives the militants rights under the Geneva Conventions but would not shield them from eventual prosecution on possible terrorism charges.

"This does not relate to their membership in a terrorist organization," Ereli told reporters.

"The MEK continues to be a designated foreign terrorist organization," he said. "We will continue to treat individuals who can be determined to have been involved in terrorist incidents with the MEK consistent with the laws that apply."

Ereli noted that each of the 3,800 militia members were being vetted to determine if they had been involved in terrorist incidents and that those implicated in attacks would be dealt with under applicable laws.

"Protected status does not mean we are protecting these people," he said. "It means we have determined that they were not belligerents in this conflict and we are according them the human rights protections consistent with the Geneva Conventions.

"When individuals are classified as protected persons, it does not in any way attenuate our actions in holding these people to account for activities that they committed as MEK members that were terrorist in nature."

Earlier Monday, Iranian government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh gave a cautious warning to the United States against making any concessions towards the group, which Tehran refers to as "hypocrites."

"The attitude towards the hypocrites in Iraq will show the truth of the claims from anybody who claims to be fighting terrorism globally," he said.

Iran has been pushing for repatriation of the several thousand Mujahedeen fighters under US military guard at Camp Ashraf northeast of Baghdad, and last December Iraq's coalition-installed interim leadership voted unanimously to expel them.

But human rights watchdogs have called on the coalition not to hand over the fighters to an uncertain fate at the hands of their archfoes in Tehran.

The People's Mujahedeen set up base in Iraq in 1986 and carried out regular cross-border raids into Iran, with which Iraq fought a bloody war between 1980 and 1988.

The group also participated in Saddam Hussein's crackdown on an uprising by Shiites and Kurds in 1991.

Several thousand Mujahedeen militiamen were disarmed by US forces following the fall of president Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003 and barred from undertaking military operations.

Ereli said the protected status -- announced by the group in Paris on Sunday -- had been accorded to the militants because they had been classified "non-belligerents" during last year's US-led invasion of Iraq.

"It was determined that they were not belligerents, and therefore as non-belligerents fall into this category with respect to the conflict with Iraq," he said.

The fate of the group's members has been a prickly question for Washington as it prosecutes its worldwide war on terror, with some US officials espousing their possible use against Iran -- lumped into an "axis of evil" by US President George W. Bush -- should "regime change" in Tehran become a formal US policy.