After France denied the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization’s demand to host its annual meeting, Iran’s opposition group will hold the gathering in Germany on 29 June.
The Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), Iran’s opposition group, announced this Tuesday that it plans to hold its annual meeting not in France, but in Germany because Paris refused to host the group’s gathering.
For years, the Iranian opposition group, which Iran considers as a terrorist organization, has held its annual gathering in Villepinte, a small commune in the northeastern suburbs of Paris.
Why France has denied the MEK’s demand to let the meeting be held in the usual place in Paris is not yet clear. However, there are reports indicating that France has rejected the MEK’s demand for hosting because of its commitments as the venue for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris that are expected to be held later this year in France’s capital.
Paris is busy hosting the Summer Olympics from 26 July to 11 August, followed by the Paralympic Games, which will be held from 28 August to 8 September.
How infamous is the MEK among Iranians?
The Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization is infamous both among Iranian officials and Iranian people. This is mostly because the group is responsible for the deaths of over 17,000 people since the Islamic Republic came to power back in 1979 following the Islamic revolution that year.
But what makes the MEK even more hated in the eyes of Iranians is that the group is also known to have fought alongside former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during his invasion of Iran a few years after Iran’s revolution, which led to the 8-year war between Iran and Iraq.
Iran has made several efforts in recent years to show the true face of the MEK to the world as a terrorist organization. Last year in August, for example, Tehran filed a lawsuit against 107 members of the MEK in the International Court of Justice. In November 2022, Iran’s Ministry of interior imposed a number of sanctions against eight Canadian officials and one institution, including travel bans and visa restrictions, over their alleged relations with the group.
But despite all the violence and assassinations that the MEK has done to Iranians over decades of animosity with the Islamic Republic, the group was surprisingly removed from the list of terrorist organizations by the United States and the European Union during the early 2010s.
