3 more Iranians burn themselves

IRAN: Three more members of the Iranian opposition movement, the Mujahideen Khalq, set themselves on fire yesterday to protest against the detention in France of the organisation's president, Ms Miriam Rajavi, and 21 others, accused of terrorism.

Mr Ali Safavi, London spokesman for the group, told The Irish Times that one self-immolation took place in London and two others in Tehran, bringing the total to 10. Ms Rajavi, who was rounded up along with 164 members of the dissident group on Tuesday, has asked for this form of protest to stop.

Ms Rajavi was expected to be released yesterday but Mr Safavi said the 22 were expected to have a court hearing today. The Mujahideen has accused France of courting favour with Tehran with these arrests. He denied that the movement had engaged in terrorist activities and said the detentions showed that the French authorities were "forsaking all the democratic traditions they once espoused".

The Mujahideen, a leftist Islamic group founded in the 1960s, mobilised Iran's students during the 1978-79 revolution against the shah. After the Islamic Republic was proclaimed in 1979, the movement sought to act as a counterweight to the conservative clerics who had seized control.

In 1981 the powerful conservative faction brutally suppressed the Mujahideen, which went underground. Many of its members were killed, imprisoned or driven into exile. Some took refuge in Iraq which was fighting a war with Iran.

The movement's leader, Mr Masud Rajavi, established a political arm, the National Council for Resistance, and a military arm, the National Liberation Army, which set up a training camp and military base for several thousand recruits in Iraq near the Iranian border. Headscarved women formed front-line units in the army, which was castigated by Tehran for carrying out operations against the clerical regime during the Iran-Iraq war.

In 1985, he married, and his wife became a joint leader. An ideologue and political personality, she has put forward a reformist view of how Islamic society should be reorganised to give equality to the sexes and different socio-economic groups.