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Iran resistance looks to a 'future president' |
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Sunday, 12 June 2005 |
By Georgie Anne Geyer
The Washington Times, August 26, 1994
Auvers-sur-Oise, France-In my 30 years as a foreign correspondent I have interviewed many
"unusual " leaders -- but I do believe that I have finally found the
most stunningly unusual one. Her name is Maryam Rajavi, she has been
elected the "future president of Iran" by the growing Iranian
Resistance, and she is driving the women-hating mullahs of Iran crazy!
Auvers-sur-Oise, France
In my 30 years as a foreign correspondent I have interviewed many
"unusual " leaders -- but I do believe that I have finally found the
most stunningly unusual one. Her name is Maryam Rajavi, she has been
elected the "future president of Iran" by the growing Iranian
Resistance, and she is driving the women-hating mullahs of Iran crazy!
To find this impressive woman, one drives about an hour outside of
Paris to this lovely, leafy, languid French town. Here, in a neat
compound of small buildings heavily guarded by the French police, the
Iranian "mujaheedin" or National Council of Resistance has long had its
government-in-exile. What is new is that Mrs. Rajavi has suddenly
become a prime and remarkably adept player at the highest levels of
plans to overthrow Iran's feudally theocratic regime.
" My first task is to give the Iranian people back their hope,," she
said during our five-hour interview. 'I want to give them hope that,
with our solidarity, they can overcome the darkness, hopelessness and
death that has enveloped our country."
As eloquent as she can be regarding freedom for Iranians -and
particularly freedom for women -- it soon becomes clear that this
cultured 41-year-old woman is a figure to be watched. Since its
founding in 1965, originally to overthrow the shah, the mujaheedin have
been active, but always in the background of world news.
But this spring, from Washington to Sydney to Bonn, tens of thousands
of exiled Iranians (20,000 in Bonn alone) demonstrated peacefully on
behalf of the Resistance. And invariably, they were shouting, "Maryam,
the shining sun, future president of Iran."
As far as she personally is concerned, Mrs. Rajavi did not really want
to be elected president last October by the 235 members of the
resistance council. "I would have preferred doing what I was doing,"
she told me, "without all the limitations that go with the presidency.
" Since she was elected based on the strong feeling here that their
time is rapidly coming it has been she who is overseeing all the
organizing, suddenly very public and noteworthy, among the between 3
million and 4 million Iranian exiles abroad. It is also Maryam Rajavi
who is rapidly becoming the Rorschach blot of hope into which the
long-suffering modern and liberal Iranians can read all kinds of hopes.
Meeting Maryam Rajavi in the mujaheedin's strange little world in
Auvers, one soon senses a complicated human being. In the simple
waiting room with its Persian rug, a classically beautiful woman comes
forward, with perfect white teeth, an aquiline nose and unflinching
gray eyes that never leave her interlocutor. There is an oddly
tremulous quality about her, and with a contradictory feeling of
solidity. This day, she was wearing a violet suit, with violet
stockings and shoes and a violet scarf tied around her head, hiding her
dark hair.
Indeed, it was when she began to wear the scarf over her head as a
university student that her upper middle-class parents in Tehran
realized something was happening inside her. "That was in itself an
open sign that something had changed," she related at one point. 'When
I wanted to wear it for the first time, I had a lot of trouble with my
family."
But that decision by a "progressive" student of metallurgy engineering,
was and is, to her, a sign of a real inner freedom. She is not --
repeat, not-- under any circumstances wearing the chador, the ugly
black robe that the Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs insist Iranian
women wear. "That is a means to enslave women," she believes. Instead,
the neat head scarf, which is part of a tradition known as the "hejab,"
"allows us to be active as human beings and not only as women."
If that decision was controversial, her decision in 1984 to marry
Massoud Rajavi, the charismatic and respected top leader of the
mujaheedin, tells even more about the degree to which women of
different cultures and beliefs find fascinating pathways to
independence and fulfillment.
For one thing, she was already married and the mother of a little girl.
She had also been elected one of the very top leaders of the
mujaheedin. But let her tell the story:
" Because of circumstances, it was necessary to marry Massoud. I had a
difficult choice to make. I had to divorce my previous husband. I felt
that for any woman to be seriously involved in political work, to work
for the ideals of nation and of countrymen... in order to be at the
highest level, any factor that would impede the movement was simply
unacceptable. If my role as joint leader was not a formalistic one --
but one to which I was to give all my energies -- my commitment could
not be conditional.
'What I did was to set an example for all the members of the great
family of the Resistance -- to show them that they must go beyond their
own personal lives."
Today, Maryam Rajavi and other mujaheedin leaders seek to convince
others that the original anti-American or 'Islamic Marxist" (or
whatever else) cast of this complex movement are things of the past.
They say they want a democratic, free-market Iran, with a political
life close to that of the European Social Democrats. Massoud Rajavi,
with whom she seems to have an excellent relationship, is in Iraq most
of the time with the mujaheedin army there, which he commands.
Meanwhile, she is becoming the symbol of something new - the modest but
active Islamic woman. "She emerges as the antithesis of the mullahs'
fundamentalism," adds Ali Safavi, a mujaheedin spokesman. "You cannot
confront fundamentalism with an anti-Islamic culture; you confront it
with a tolerant and modern Islam. Our society is a society bleeding, a
society needing a symbol to offer compassion, mercy, tolerance and
love. She has those attributes more than anyone, particularly because
she is a woman and because the most heinous crimes of the regime were
committed against women... In her case, nothing is a formality - she
has proven herself in everything."
By Georgie Anne Geyer
The Washington Times, August 26, 1994 |
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