Open letter to Maryam Rajavi from an Iranian woman who has not ever seen her sister
Mrs Maryam Rajavi,
After greeting, I am Mona Hussein Nejad – 31 years old. I was an infant aged only 10 days when I was taken from the bosom of my mother and her milk into tears and wailing and left in the bosom of my grandmother in Tehran. My father and mother with my older sister secretly fled Iran from the oppression of the Iranian regime with a large number of members of the PMOI thirty-one years ago. I am the youngest daughter of martyr Mojahed Farideh Karim Zadeh and the younger sister of Mojahed Zainab Hussein Nejad, one of the residents of Camp Al-Hurriyeh (Liberty), the headquarters of the PMOI in the proximity of Baghdad airport .
I cried during the lean years, eager to see my mother, looking for the intimacy of her embrace, the intimate lap of her tender motherhood, which I did not experience except for only ten days. So I stayed, sighing to see her for the first time in my life until I was 18 years of age, when I discovered that I had lost my mother a few years ago and my waiting will not end for seeing her.
But I ask will my waiting end up the same for seeing my sister Zainab, who I have not seen in my life? I remember that when I was a teenager I wished that my parents had taken me also with them and I tell myself: Blessed sister Zainab who lives with mama and papa. But I was not to know that she lived after the death of our mother under the care of individuals and families and it is not about us and them, that she also grew up under difficulties. But today I wish that they had not taken Zainab with them but they had left her here for us to live and grow old together and share our sorrows and joys and share each other’s concerns, and pain.
Mrs Rajavi,
I have not seen and held my sister Zainab in my life for more than thirty years now, and I have not heard news about her safety also, especially after the terrorist attacks on camp Ashraf and camp Al-Hurriyeh (Liberty) in Iraq, and I do not have information about her condition. I ask, cannot your Excellency, as the senior leadership of the People’s Mojahedin Organization, order her to relate me so that I hear her voice at least to make me sure of her safety and health? Or allow us to meet together and embrace each other for the first time in our lives even so I can smell the odour of our martyred mother because she has been grown and nurtured for many years in the bosom of our mother? I do not know whether the relentless struggle against the system of government established in Iran may have kept something in the heart of the emotions of motherhood and the love that binds sisters or not? If there has remained something of it, you can understand my feelings and my sense. I travelled to Baghdad a year ago and asked officials at the People’s Mojahedin Organization through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations and the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry to meet my sister Zainab, or at least see her, even from a distance, and so I went for this purpose to the door of Camp Al-Hurriyeh (Liberty), before taking off on the plane at Baghdad airport adjacent to the camp to return to Iran. But officials in the organization did not allow us to meet and see each other so I went back to my homeland with tearful eyes.
Mrs Rajavi,
I ask you:
1 – to provide the possibility for my sister Zainab Hussein Nejad one of the residents of Camp Al-Hurriyeh ( Liberty ) to call me even briefly about her safety and health.
2 – Do not allow me to wait all my life to see and hug my sister and do not let it go on, God forbid, as did my waiting to see my mother.
3 – Remove the restrictions and harassment from the residents of the camp toward contact with their families, to bring about an end of the concern of the families about the conditions of their children and their relatives.
With my thanks in advance to your Excellency.
Mona Hussein Nejad