Batul Rajaee was a top commander of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO/ MEK/ PMOI/ Cult of Rajavi). She died of cancer in 2012. The news of her death was a pleasing one for a large number of members and former members of the group.
Batul Rajaee is the symbol of an oppressive violent commander of the Cult of Rajavi who always wanted to serve “Sister Maryam” (Maryam Rajavi) by punishing the rank and file. After her death, at least four defectors of the group gave testimonies about the atrocities committed by Batul. Foad Basri, Hadi Shabani, Ali PourAhmad and Kambiz Bagherzadeh confirm that she was so devoted to the leaders of MEK that the rank and file could hardly ever stay safe from her violent abusive behavior.
Batul Rajaee
“When I first entered MEK in the Winter of 1984, as a 19-year-old boy, there was no woman in the entrance section until the day I saw Batul Rajaee,” Ali PourAhmad writes about her. “I was shocked to see her. I wondered if all women in the MEK were like her?”
Batul Rajaee was also the commander of prisons in Camp Ashraf, for a period of time. “She was so aggressive that you can simply imagine what she would do with the prisoners of the group—who were also members of the group,” Hadi Shabani writes. “Rajavi needed such atrocious women to control his cult. Batul Rajaee had been turned into a person that no one was willing to encounter her, even for a second.”
Not all women in the cult of Rajavi were such monsters as Batul Rajaee was. However, most female commanders have been cruel people who go crazy easily and abuse their lower ranks verbally and physically. Mahvash Sepehri, Fahimeh Arvani and Mozhgan Parsaee are a few of dozens of female commanders of MEK. They are notoriously known as most hated figures of the group.
Considering testimonies of both male and female defectors of MEK, one can find a very destructive culture that rules the group’s female members. The cult around Massoud Rajavi’s personality that practices many suppressive jargons and is committed to polygamy has been simply able to demolish emotions in the inner self of these women.
“Salvation Dancing” is one of the most notorious jargons in the Cult of Rajavi in which female members of the group’s Elit Council had to remove their clothes and dance nude before the eyes of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. “These fierce female commanders are the outcome of salvation dance,” Hadi Shabani writes.
By Mazda Parsi