Seectioh 1 of 2 - History of the Resistance Part 4: Massoud Rajavi and the National Council of Resistance of Iran

The end of mass open opposition to the regime came on 20 June 1981, when 500,000 rallied in the streets of Tehran to hear Massoud Rajavi speak and stand for democratic rights.   The people were attacked with brutal and lethal force by the IRGC and Basij thugs using live ammunition.   Hundreds died on the streets, thousands were arrested, tortured and many were executed. 

It was no longer safe for the people of Iran to demonstrate openly, and Massoud Rajavi had become the Mullahs’ enemy number 1.  In July, he formed the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition of like-minded freedom seeking groups and individuals.   In early August, he escaped to France with the former first President Banisadr.   Banisadr had been impeached by the majlis on 21 June 1981 and removed from office by Khomeini on 22 June, for allegedly trying to undermine the power of the clerics.   The PMOI kept him safely hidden until Massoud was ready to leave the country, flown out by an air force pilot who was a PMOI sympathiser.

Massoud’s brother was a doctor in Auvers-sur-Oise, which is where they went to stay and this is still the French headquarters of the NCRI.
Massoud Rajavi was greeted with great interest and sympathy in the West.   In September 1981, he was interviewed in Auvers for Time magazine and an article published with the headline “We are on the offensive.”    Dismissing allegations that the PMOI was an Islamic/Marxist hybrid group with the words “every schoolboy knows that Marxists do not believe in God”, Massoud deemed the Mullah’s regime weak and lacking in popular support, unable to keep control of the people and their desire for freedom.

However, the brutality and ruthlessness of the regime abroad as well as at home and the immense machinery they established to spread propaganda, misinformation and lies throughout the globe, together with their ability to coerce and corrupt foreign governments, was not yet fully in place.   When it was, it upturned the fortunes of the Resistance movement and it would be another 35 years before the words “We are on the offensive” would be heard again. 

History of the Resistance - 1978 to the Present by The Rt. Hon. David Jones MP

Writing the modern history of Iran is a painstaking task.  The Rt. Hon. David Jones MP has followed Iran's history for decades, and he brought his thoughts and research together for a speech given to the International Liberty Association in 2021.  It is below:

Text of speech by Rt. Hon. David Jones MP, former Secretary of State for Wales at ILA Zoom event on Saturday 30 January 2021:

Good afternoon.

I am delighted to be able to be with you, if only virtually, today.  

The cause of the International Liberty Association is a just one. I am proud to support any campaign for human rights, justice and the dignity of mankind.  

As we approach the 43rd anniversary of the Ayatollahs’ takeover in Iran, I would like to give you a brief account of my early involvement in the cause of securing democracy in Iran.  

When Ayatollah Khomeini took control in 1979, I was a young lawyer.
I was hopeful at that time that a democratic Iran would be of huge benefit to the entire world, and particularly the Middle East.  

But very soon I realised that, far from creating democracy in Iran ‐ which was also the aspiration of young Iranians ‐ the people of a great country had been taken hostage by a medieval, theocratic regime that wanted, in effect,  to take Iran back several centuries.  

News of the first executions on the rooftop of Khomeini’s residence in Tehran in the early days of the revolution was an immediate cause of alarm.  

As a lawyer, I was particularly concerned to see people’s lives being taken without anything that resembled due process of law.  

Then we heard about the plight of women in Iran. When Khomeini was in Paris ‐ before his return to Tehran ‐ he was asked by journalists – particularly female ones ‐ about the use of the hijab. He assured them that there would be no forced hijab in the Iran after the Shah left.  It quickly became apparent that that statement was untrue.  

Since Khomeini’s return, many tens of thousands of brave Iranians have lost their lives trying to take back what they were aiming to achieve with their sacrifices in 1979. We know that in the summer of 1988 alone, over 30,000 prisoners were executed.  

But the question is: how could such a regime come to power?  

We all remember that the revolution in Iran in 1979 was so massive, so popular that it was unprecedented in history.  No one thought it would turn so sour so soon.  

So what happened?  

The reality is that the young inspirational leaders who had emerged from Dr Mossadegh’s National Movement, were all in the Shah’s prisons. Some were executed, and the rest stayed there until the last days of the Shah.

When the people opened the doors of the prisons and let the prisoners free, Khomeini had already hijacked the revolution and, with the help of foreign media, had installed himself as the leader of the revolutionary movement.  

He understood very well that he could not gain the support of the young Iranians who were risking their lives in pursuit of freedom if they knew what his true aims were.  

So, when he was in Paris, he made promises that were, frankly, deceitful.
He portrayed himself as a man of religion, uninterested in politics, who intended to go to Qom, the “Vatican” of Iran, to practise his religion, and would leave the government to competent people.  

But he showed his true colours after arriving in Tehran. He reneged on his promise that women would be free to choose their clothes. He excluded them from their jobs and banned them altogether from certain roles, including the judiciary and political leadership.

Khomeini knew that he could not declare a Caliphate right there and then. So he called for a referendum; but the question was loaded:

“Do you want the Shah and a monarchy or an Islamic republic?”
Many, including the main opposition force, the PMOI, questioned the validity of that referendum. Nobody had any idea of what was meant by an Islamic Republic.  

The PMOI asked for that to be clarified but it wasn’t to be.  

So 98% of participants said no to the Shah and monarchy – which was, of course, to be expected‐ but the outcome could not in any sense be said to be support for a system that nobody understood and was utterly undefined.

So the fever of the revolution was used to cement Khomeini’s position, and for the past 41 years the regime has used that referendum as justification for remaining in power, even after mass popular uprisings that have been taking place every few years since the first on June 20th, 1981.  

The regime turned out not to be Islamic (so I am assured by my many Muslim friends who are familiar with teachings of Mohammad,  who is called the Mercy of Both Worlds, and in whose Holy Book every chapter begins with In the name of God the Most Passionate the Most Merciful.)

Neither passion nor mercy is in the DNA of this brutal regime.

Nor is it a republic, in which elected officials run the government.  

It is a medieval theocracy, with all the power in the hands of the Supreme Leader or the Caliph.  

In fact, Khomeini later disclosed his real intention, which was to create an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East and beyond.  

It was this fundamentalist view that made him to create the Revolutionary Guards, the Qods Force and all the other oppressive forces that are there to protect this backward ideology and help it to expand beyond the borders of Iran.   

That is why the Iran‐Iraq war started and lasted for 8 years.  

We all know that Saddam started the war.  

But what we also know now is that it was Khomeini who called for the war, called for the overthrow of the government of Iraq in 1979 and financed and trained Iraqi Shi’ites to attempt to overthrow the Iraqi government.  

Less than 2 years after the war started, Iraq removed all its forces from Iran and called for a ceasefire.  

Many peace initiatives by world leaders and the UN were rejected by Khomeini. Only after it was clear in 1988 that he was losing the war, did Khomeini accept the ceasefire resolution of the United Nations – the famous Resolution 598.  

So the roots of Islamist fundamentalism can be traced back to Khomeini’s 1979 takeover of the resources of the rich country of Iran.  

Recent news has shown the increasing coordination between Al Qaeda and the mullahs’ regime.  

For long the regime was taking advantage of an inherent naiveté in the West about the difference between Shia and Sunni branches of Islam.  

Many Westerners thought that the two branches had been at war for centuries and that there was no way they collaborate.  

It is only recently that the US government has recognised the organic link between al‐Qaeda and Iran.  

The events subsequent to the 2003 Iraq war provided an easy ride for the mullahs’ regime to gain territories that Khomeini could not himself secure by 8 years of war with Iraq.

It is clear that the only winner of the coalition’s war with Iraq was Iran.  

Of course, the regime had extended its reach to the Middle East countries by proxy forces, most notably Hezbollah, which was established in Lebanon in 1982 with Iranian financial backing and training.

Through Hezbollah the Iranian regime was, and is, controlling a network of gangsters and drug traffickers across the world via Hezbollah, and another similar Houthi group in Yemen (actually another division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards).  

We know very well that when the uprising in Syria began in 2011 it was Iran and Hezbollah that went there and turned it to a war, with millions of refugees, many of whom eventually came to Europe and changed the political landscape here.

The root of Islamic fundamentalism lies in Iran.  

Many of the various groups that have sprung up in recent years are either directly and organically linked to Tehran, or indirectly have been created as a response to Tehran’s suppression of Muslim populations in Sunni majority areas of the Middle East.

One interesting case is that of DAESH or ISIS. We all know that Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by US forces last year (2020) in Baghdad, was effectively in control of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen via proxy forces.

In 2011, Al Baghdadi, who later became the leader of ISIS, was in prison in Iraq.  
On the orders of Soleimani, Nuri al‐Maleki, who was then Prime Minister of Iraq and a client of Iran, released al‐Baghdadi, who went to Syria.  

John Kerry, the then US Secretary of State, revealed in 2015 that Assad (again under orders from Tehran) released thousands of prisoners who formed the basis of ISIS and went on to capture vast areas of land in Syria.  

In 2014, when the Sunni population were rising up against the corrupt and oppressive Iraqi government of al‐Maleki, 1,800 or fewer ISIS operatives invaded the Iraqi city of Mosul, in the Sunni part of Iraq, and diverted attention from al‐Maleki.  They started attacking the Sunni population in Iraq and went north to Kurdistan instead of south to oust the Shia government of Iraq.

Maleki ordered the Iraqi troops to abandon their weapons and leave the area. Some 50,000 Iraqi soldiers left nearly 4 billion dollars of American weaponry in the hands of ISIS and overnight enriched them.   

Then the regime in Tehran used the presence of ISIS as an excuse to establish a replica of the IRGC in Iraq called the Popular Mobilisation Force; another terrorist entity that killed Sunnis by the thousands in the most barbaric of ways.  

A lot can be said about the interaction of the Iranian regime with all these terrorist groups.  

One thing is clear: they are either directly linked to Iran or have been created as a result of Iran’s barbaric treatment of Sunnis in the Middle East.  

Either way, at the centre of the spider’s web is Tehran.  The Tehran regime is intent on pursuing a global Islamic state, which is why it seeks to acquire the nuclear weapons and continues its proxy wars in Yemen and Syria.  

We have to stand up to it; for the sake of humanity and for human rights.  

I congratulate you for standing firm in your resolve to do so.

And I support the ILA’s drive to bring respect for human rights to Iran. 

Ends

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