++ On International Women’s Day, many women formers have written about their experience of being females inside the MEK. They talk of spurious hysterectomies, rape, forced marriage, forced divorces and a myriad of other wrongs and humiliations. Some write about the present day and how the MEK refuses to acknowledge or treat women’s medical problems such as issues around periods, the menopause, cancers (breast, cervical, uterine, etc). Alongside these memoirs, the Iranian Women’s Association based in Germany attended a meeting in Brussels. Afterwards, they met with several MEPs and had the opportunity to explain the particular conditions for women inside the MEK.
++ To mark International Women’s Day, Maryam Rajavi emerged in Albania – which was not unexpected after having sent her lobbyists as emissaries to that country. The MEK blocked the public road between the two apartment blocks used by MEK, and dressed it up as the Oscars red carpet. Maryam Rajavi was filmed traversing this street from one end to another with flag waving MEK members on both sides. At the end she poses like an Oscar winner. What the MEK haven’t realised is that instead of looking at her, observers notice that the men and women lining the street are all over 60 years old. Rajavi tries to act as a humanitarian person by trying to kiss the stumps of a disabled woman in a wheelchair who has lost her legs in one of the attacks on the MEK camps in Iraq since 2009. The attacks took place long after international organisations and the government of Iraq had warned Rajavi that the camps are vulnerable and begged her to remove everyone to safety in third countries. Many MEK were killed due to Rajavi’s insistence that she get paid for the land of Camp Ashraf before anyone could come out. She used the members as bargaining chips, this disabled woman was one of them. Her parade received no coverage whatsoever from any media outlet. Whoever paid for it got nothing back for their expenditure. Even the MEK’s own websites reverted the next day to business as usual – attacking Iran, which is what they are paid for. Every day the MEK websites publish one sensational exposure or other about something that happens in Iran (they want to pretend they have people inside Iran). The sites promote non-rapprochement with America and the hope that America will go to war. These revelations about Iran have become so silly that a proverb has been coined for it, Iranians call it ‘the yoghurt strategy’. That means ‘the act of waiting for decades for somebody’s yoghurt dish to fall to the ground and break so they will be able to lick some up from the floor’. After forty years, the MEK are still waiting.
In English:
++ A film broadcast by National Geographic and made by Michael Wade exposes the MEK in a way that was certainly unintended. The film reveals four leading members contradicting themselves by talking about the MEK’s public version of their aims and their internal ideological version of the same. Even worse is the filming of an MEK member who has been on the US wanted list on charges of funding terrorism since 1985. It was thought he was out of reach in Iraq, however he is now resident in France in Maryam Rajavi’s headquarters at Auvers-sur-Oise where the film was made.
++ Nejat Society reported that former POW (Iran-Iraq war), Karim Aliyari was able to free himself from the clutches of the MEK while in Albania. He has now regained contact with his family in Iran.
++ Faryad Azadi, Paris reports that several MEK formers wrote to the Canadian Senate warning them about the presence of Shahram Golestaneh who is undertaking lobbying there under false pretences. Golestaneh poses as the head of the Iran Democratic Association. This is a bogus organisation and Golestaneh has been ordered to hide his membership of the MEK.
11 March 2017