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Hello, my name is Anne Singleton, otherwise
known as the wife of Massoud Khodabandeh. I have written a lot about the
Mojahedin. This is the first time actually I have to stand up and talk about
them, so I’m very nervous, ….
I think what might be the first question for all of
you is why is a non-Iranian woman became involved with the Mojahedin and I can't
give you a simple answer: because like all of you I have my own story, I got
pulled into it in my own way, just as all of you in your own ways got
involved. But once I was in there I found the same thing that all you found
out, that this is not what we thought it would be. After years and years of
struggle I think we all know now that this organization is not the
organization that we joined. It’s not doing and being the way that we wanted
it to be. For maybe twelve years, I supported the Mojahedin from a distance,
I was a young person, I was student. I got caught up in a kind of romantic
idea of revolution. How romantic is revolution? And I found the Mojahedin’s
struggle something very pure and very worthwhile, so I supported the
organization for a long time until one moment, a very defining moment I
decided to give up everything I had, my house, my car, my job and join the
organization full time. I was dragged into a cult. I didn’t know I was being
dragged in, but the techniques which were used to pull all of you in were
used on me too. And they work; you get pulled in to give up slowly and give
up everything that you have. And you end up completely enthralled. I mean
you’re their prisoner. You don’t know that you’re their prisoner, but you
become their prisoner and at that point they can do anything they like with
you, and they do…
I have to say that I haven’t come here to tell you my story, because there
are stories much more interesting than mine. What I want to say is that,
like most of you, when I was in that organization I had no idea of what was
happening behind the scenes. There are, I can say that most of you who have
left that organization had found out and that’s why you left. It took me
three years from the moment I decided I wasn’t cut out to be 'Mojahed'. And
I became as you describe 'Borideh' (defector), and it took me three years to
actually leave them because they wouldn’t let me leave, as you know. It
fortunately was a lot easier for me because I was in my own country. But
even then, in my own country with my own language with our social security
system with everything, with my family around me it was extremely hard to
leave. Because they kept telling me “you belong to Maryam Rajavi” and
something that had been worked on inside my head believed them, and I found
it extremely hard to reject that brainwashing, because it is brainwashing.
What I didn’t know until I left the organization completely is that for
years and years and years people like me who wanted to leave were ending up
in Abu Ghraib prison, were ending up in the Mojahedin's own prisons in
Ashraf (camp). I had no idea. And yet I had been supporting that
organization for the greater part of two decades as an insider, so you can
imagine how easy it is for that organization to fool western politicians and
media. If someone like me who was inside them didn’t know about the
cruelties, the lies, the deception, and the brainwashing techniques, how can
anyone outside that organization find that out. When I left, that became my
main objective; to let the world know what I had recently discovered. That’s
why I set up an organization called Iran-interlink, that’s why I wrote my
book and that’s why I continue today like all of you to come and speak out
against Maryam Rajavi, Massoud Rajavi and the violation of human rights
which they inflict on their own members, every single member. It’s not just
people like yourselves, who’ve been in prison, it’s not just the people
who’ve left and become dissidents, every single member of that organization
who’s subjected to their psychological manipulation is a victim of human
rights abuse. One of the other aims that I had, as well as to speak out
about the organization, was to help people get out. I have to confess that
it was my mother-in-law who started me off on that track. She reckoned I
have rescued one of her sons and now she asked me to go and rescue her other
son who was still in the Mojahedin. I am sure you all know Ebrahim
Khodabandeh - who somehow rescued himself! So a lot of the focus of our work
has been to try to help and support the people, rather to work to get people
out of the organization. Of course, that’s extremely difficult because the
Mojahedin don’t allow contact within themselves and with the outside world.
That is part of their sect culture, that’s what holds the whole thing
together. I won’t talk a lot about what we’ve done in the past, what I will
say is that the best gift in a way that we’ve had in this work is that the
Mojahedin in Iraq have been granted protected person status under the Fourth
Geneva Convention in Camp Ashraf. Now, the Mojahedin of course declare that
as a victory on their own part because they said that they were not being
recognized as terrorists - even though the people who gave them protected
status insisted that they’re still a terrorist outfit. I don’t think that
it’s relevant to [talk about them as] terrorist and non-terrorist, their
history speaks for itself. What the protected person status person
does; well, it gives legal framework to the work of people like us. I
recommend that you all look at the document. I’m sure it’s in Farsi on the
United Nations’ website. What it stresses is that people who are protected
persons have contact with their families. It stresses that there should be a
list of every single member, every single person who’s a protected person
made available to relatives. It says that anyone who is a protected person
can ask to leave that country. These are very, very important rights every
single person in Camp Ashraf has but they don’t know they have those rights;
it’s our job to push from the outside to break down those barriers and we
can do that together and that’s the stage we’re at now, where we have now a
very powerful legal framework to help to get these people out wherever they
want to go, whether back to Iran or to European countries. They, under that
law, are treated as individuals not members of an organization. That’s the
distinction we have to keep pushing. These people are individual people they
are not slaves of Rajavi.
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