“Massoud’s generation“is a title Maryam Rajavi gives to those members of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO/ MEK/ PMOI/ Cult of Rajavi) who originally joined the group before the 1979 revolution up to 1985 when recruitment methods of the group changed. The average age of these people is between sixty to seventy years old now.
Ann Singleton the British former member of the MEK is the author of”Saddam’s Private Army”, a book on the Cult of Rajavi. In 2003 when the group was in Camp Ashraf, Iraq, the writer believed that Massoud’s generation makes it impossible to regard Mojahedin as an ordinary fighting force.”Certainly, it is not a force which can take on Iranian armed forces,”Singleton writes in the book.”However, it is a force which is prepared to sacrifice itself in such a way that makes it just as useful to Rajavi in the long term. These members are in”to the end”. For them ordinary life has no attraction or meaning. Indeed, one of the Mojahedin’s pejorative terms about their supporters is that they are ‘ordinary people’.”
Elizabeth Rubin the author of the famous article on the New York Times Magazine,”The Cult of Rajavi“, presents an evidence of what Singlton says. She writes of a woman in Camp Ashraf as”one of the most disturbing encounters“she had in Ashraf. She visited Mahnaz Bazazi, a commander who had been with the Mujahedeen for 25 years up to 2003.
“I met her in the Ashraf hospital,”Rubin writes.”Bazazi was probably on drugs, but that didn’t explain the natural intoxication she was radiating, despite — or perhaps because — she had just had her legs amputated after an American missile slammed into the warehouse she was guarding. The doctor told me he never heard her complain.
”Even in this way, she’s confronting the Mullahs,” he said. Bazazi interrupted him. ”This is not me personally,” she said in a soft high voice. ”These are the ideas of the Mujahedeen. It’s true I lost my legs, but my struggle will continue because I have a wish — the freedom of my country.” At the foot of her bed, surrounded by candles, stood a large framed photograph of Maryam in a white dress and blue flowered head scarf.”
Ann Singleton accurately explains this allegedly extraordinary situation.”Members of the Mojahedin exude a kind of attractive purity and intensity of purpose, which on the surface appears as a deep personal confidence and conviction,”she asserts.”Their behaviour however is the result of having lost all their inhibitions and having no personal responsibility for anything or toward anyone beyond obedience to Rajavi. Their existence is completely outside what is recognizable as normal experience. The normal values which govern any society, have no meaning for the Mojahedin. The values of honesty, truth, independent thought, freedom of action to name but a few, have no meaning here.”
However, a large number of the so-called generation of Massoud turned out to be ordinary people with ordinary ambitions and values. The Cult-like structure of the group was not so successful in keeping them all in. Many of the early members left the group in recent decades although the majority of defectors still consists of those who were deceitfully recruited as war prisoners or young Iranian job seekers in Turkey.
Saeed Shahsavandi, Ali Rastgoo, GhobanAli Hosseinnezhad, Hadi Shams Haeri, Hamed Sarrafpour, Mohammad Hossein Sobhani, Mohammad Razaghi, Masoud Khodabandeh, Ebrahim Khodabandeh, Mehdi Khoshhal, Mohammad Karami, Esmaeel Vafa Yaghmai are just some of the so-called generation who left the group and as soon as they entered the free world they began denouncing the group’s oppressive structure. Somewhere in the path, they started doubting Massoud Rajavi’s indoctrinations and quit. The glamorous portrait of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi shattered in their minds.
Sooner or later this will happen to the other members of the Mujahedin Khalq. Seemingly, Massoud generation is eating Massoud!
By Mazda Parsi