In the past three weeks, the media of the Mujahedin-e Khalq have announced the death of one of their members every week on average. The last death announced in Camp Ashraf 3 in Albania is that of a woman named Mojgan Mahdavi, who, according to information published on the website of the MEK, was “born in 1961 in Tehran, a biochemical engineer in the United States, in her final year of her master’s degree in Oklahoma.” She had been associated with the Muslim Student Association of Supporters of the MEK in the United States since 1979 and had been working full-time for the group since 1987.
According to the claims of the MEK media, after participating in military operations in 1988, Mojgan Mahdavi “was quickly promoted to the command of one of the combat units due to her qualifications.”
The study of the process of young Iranians educated in universities in Western countries, including the United States, joining the MEK in the 1970s and 1980s is one of the important and thought-provoking topics in the history of contemporary political and social developments in Iran. The phenomenon of attracting students living abroad to ideological and radical movements has multidimensional psychological, political, and social roots and factors that have been analyzed by researchers in political history and the psychology of closed organizations.
It is noteworthy that many people joined political movements at that time, but it was only the members of the MEK who, after nearly half a century, did not separate from the organization and went to their deaths without having achieved anything from the so-called years of struggle.
How could a person with a university education in the West abandon everything and join the centralized structure and military base of the MEK in the deserts of Iraq? Documentary sources, sociological research, as well as the memories of former members, cite the following four factors as the main reasons for such choices:
- The revolutionary vibe that dominated the atmosphere in Iran and the world in the years leading up to the 1979 Revolution, the strong tendency of young people towards justice-seeking and anti-authoritarian thoughts, and the initial appeal of the MEK’s slogans of combining Islam and modernity and fighting the Pahlavi regime, caused many educated young people in Iran and abroad to be attracted to the organization.
- Student associations abroad played a prominent role in the process of recruiting young university students. “Muslim student associations” affiliated with or inclined to the MEK in American and European universities, which acted as the main centers for recruiting, propagating, and brainwashing Iranian students, were widely active in those years.
- Identity crises and a sense of national responsibility were another factor in pushing young people to join radical revolutionary groups such as the MEK. Students studying abroad sometimes faced a sense of remorse over the political conditions within the country or poverty and tyranny, and the organization exploited this feeling and turned it into an absolute organizational commitment.
- After individuals entered the secret organization and then the private army of the MEK in Iraq, in the isolated space that the leaders of the organization had created, over time, through self-criticism meetings (current operations) and severing ties with the outside world and family, the individual independence of the members was destroyed.
The process of Mojgan Mahdavi becoming a completely obedient agent of the group or a senior commander (as is the case with many high-ranking members of the organization) is the product of a complete reconstruction of the personality within the context of an extremist political cult. In this structure, over time, “Massoud and Maryam Rajavi” replace all individual, emotional and social values, and one sees his or her entire identity in the survival of the group and absolute obedience to the leaders.
It so happens that after Neda Hassani’s self-immolation to protest Maryam Rajavi’s arrest in France, in 2003, Mojgan Mahdavi addresses the people present in the Ashraf dining hall and says passionately: “If the leadership (Massoud and Maryam Rajavi) orders us, we all have a duty to self-immolate and we will convey the organization’s voice of protest to them (French Government).”
Mazda Parsi