On the occasion of International Women’s Day, Maryam Rajavi addressed a group of sympathizers gathered in Auvers-sur-Oise on February 23, 2008. In her speech she commended thousands of the so-called martyred Mojahedin women like Sedigheh Mojaveri and Neda Hassani, who had committed self-immolation on her cult’s command for her release from the arrest, as pioneers for freedom of women.
There hardly exist any other group in Iranian’s contemporary history as notorious as the Cult of Mojahedin that for more than three decades has deceived and enslaved a number of Iranian women and has held them against their will in a military camp in the heart of Iraqi deserts under the harshest conditions for the emancipation of women! Now Camp Ashraf is a prison to thousands of women and men who have lost about 30 years of their lives struggling to accomplish the ambitions of the cult leaders living an inequally luxurious, easy life in the heart of Paris and who shed crocodile tears for who they call “the world’s largest concentration of vanguards of the equality”. Exploitation of women within the Cult of Mojahedin characterizes a new phenomenon in the cult techniques to enslave free people. More than one thousand women in Camp Ashraf have long suffered and been denied of their tender human individuality for a cause that the cult has concluded will never accomplish. Among them, there can be found brave ones who have managed to escape the bonds of Ashraf to inform the world of the oppressions women are suffering within its wall. Ms. Batul Soltani was a member of the Leadership Council of MKO who could escape from Camp Ashraf in 2006 and moved into TIPF, which is run by the US forces in Iraq. Then on 14 January 2008 she left the TIPF and moved to Baghdad in order to go abroad but she changed her mind to stay in Iraq and start a legal battle against the organization for all torments she had undergone and suffered. Interviewed by Sahar Family Foundation (SFF) in Iraq, when she was asked that as a wife and as a mother what demands she was following, she said: “You’d better ask ‘as a human being’ what demands am I following. Of course a human being who has lost 20 years of her life and could not be with her father when he was dying and whose mother is badly missing her and who now wants to regain her husband and her children and her crushed life and rebuild everything from scratch. I will strive to attract the attention of all international political bodies as well as the media to the case of the families of MKO members in Iraq and I wish to help them by any means that I can.” The issue of emancipation of women is taking a different turn and meaning in the Cult of Mojahedin. It is no more the cult that claims to be engaged in a struggle for the freedom of women, rather, it is escaped members, especially women, who strive to free women from the hold of the cult. On one side, under the pretext of equality, liberty, freedom of choice and democracy the cult exploits women and deprives them of their most basic Human rights. On the other side, those escaped from the atrocities of the cult have started a battle to help their fellow members still held in the clutches of the cult to survive. Can Maryam Rajavi as the she-guru of the cult ever explain what is going on in her cult and what does she really mean when she talks about freedom, equality and democracy?
