++ Al Jazeera reported the death this week of former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani in Paris. Bani Sadr left Iran with Massoud Rajavi in 1981. Commentary on his death focused on the point that he was fooled by Rajavi to come to Paris to join a coalition of opposition forces. However, when he discovered that Rajavi was going to work with Saddam Hussein (during the Iran-Iraq war) he refused to continue working with Rajavi and the MEK. After this split Bani Sadr became pro-active in helping former MEK members in the West and in promoting human rights.
++ News that Albania is to be used by the UK Home Office to host its asylum seekers is not a new phenomenon. The Americans also recently said they would ‘temporarily’ hold Afghan refugees in Albania for processing. Albania is notorious as a centre for quarantine to hold questionable people and to see what to do with them. In these recent examples, Britain and the US will choose which asylum seekers they want – which are useful – and reject those who are unwanted or even dangerous. The situation with the MEK was the same. The original US plan was to move the MEK members from Iraq to Albania, choose who they wanted and disperse the rest into the community. But with the MEK the Americans changed their mind under pressure by the Israelis, Neocons and anti-Iran elements, and instead of de-radicalising them, gave them land and support to build the cult again. Maryam Rajavi admitted that the MEK was not capable of doing what it had done with Saddam Hussein, but she convinced these backers that she could get the MEK to work under the tutelage of Prince Turki; intelligence based work that they had also done for Saddam. So, the click farm was established and the MEK set about stitching people up, feeding the false court case of Hamid Nouri and other dirty work like helping Israel with the assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists.
++ As the court case of Hamid Nouri rumbles on in Sweden, several commentators reacted to the public rivalry between Maryam Rajavi and chief witness Iraj Mesdaghi. The MEK sites are totally allocated to him now and the MEK even published a thick book just to demonise him. Ironically, everything in the book and on the sites is based on some documents allegedly originating from inside Gohardasht prison and Iran’s Intelligence ministry which purportedly show that Mesdaghi did not resist under torture. Commentators have asked ‘did any other people actually resist torture?’ People also ask: ‘Who except Iranian intelligence could feed you that information. Are you claiming to have access to Iran’s Intelligence ministry?’ Commentators point out that three times more information than this has been exposed about Massoud Rajavi himself. Including former SAVAK officials admitting that after his arrest he cooperated with them, and that is why he wasn’t executed along with the other leading MEK members in 1972. They detailed the information that Rajavi gave up – naming the places and people and plans he exposed so they could be arrested. People now ask how those documents about Rajavi are different from these about Mesdaghi. But the main issue that people are highlighting is what kind of court is this in Sweden where the witnesses are publishing books against each other during the court case and accusing each other of being paid agents of the Intelligence ministry of Iran and the Swedish judge doesn’t either see or care.
++ Atefeh Nadalian from Nejat Society, Tehran has published a lengthy analysis with facts about women in the MEK, titled ‘From Talking to Deeds’. Nadalian explains how from the start of the MEK to the present time, the MEK talk constantly about how pro-women the organisation is. But in their deeds the MEK is shown to enact the worst suppression of women even from the time of the Shah. In the MEK, marriage, divorce, having children, giving up children, are all done by force. Women in the MEK don’t even have the rights of a farmyard animal, let alone human rights. The situation now is so inhumane that elderly MEK women are banned from having the support of their families in their old age. Their families cannot care for them, or even place them in a home so as to give them comfort and dignity. All this, however, is different when it comes to the Qajar-Azodanlu and Abrishamchi families. They are rolling in wealth and castles and privilege.
Oct 08, 2021
