We are at the beginning of the 60th year of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI). In its six-decade history, the PMOI has undergone many trials and tribulations and transformed from a small group to a nationwide and worldwide movement. However, the one thing that has remained consistent throughout this period is loyalty to the cause and infinite sacrifice from PMOI members of all ranks.
As they have proven time and again, the PMOI’s loyalty is only to the people of Iran and the cause they fight for is freedom. Freedom from oppression, discrimination, inequality, and exploitation. Freedom in all its individual and social aspects; including freedom of thought and expression, freedom of assembly, and the rejection of all forms of ethnic, religious, class, and gender inequality.
Resistance Units celebrate PMOI founding anniversary https://t.co/inDr2x9DMd
— People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) (@Mojahedineng) September 4, 2024
Of course, talking about freedom is not that difficult. The challenge arises when it comes to paying the price for freedom and fighting against the enemies of freedom. This has been the experience of all the ups and downs in the movements and uprisings of the last hundred years in Iran, and the Achilles’ heel of all those who have claimed to be friends of the people and the nation. However, in practice, many have chosen comfort and turned their backs on their commitments, sacrificing freedom under the boots of the shah’s military dictatorship and the slippers of the mullahs, opting instead for the path of compromise with and surrender to tyranny.
However, over the past six decades, the PMOI has demonstrated that in defending freedom and democracy—meaning the sovereignty of the people as the most fundamental right of the populace and the guarantee of Iran’s independence and progress—they have never compromised with either the Shah or the mullahs’ dictatorships. They have paid the price for this with all its gravity. As PMOI Secretary General Zahra Merrikhi said, “Taking a stand and resisting at any cost has become synonymous with the PMOI.”
The fact that the PMOI is absolutely uncompromising on freedom and the rights of the people is a truth to which both friends and foes attest, each in their own language.
Forty days before June 20, 1981, when the mullahs’ regime launched a bloody crackdown against the PMOI, regime founder and then–supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini addressed the PMOI, saying: “If, out of a thousand possibilities, I thought there was a one percent chance that you would abandon what you want to do, I would have been willing to reconcile with you…”
Indeed, Khomeini tried in a thousand ways to force the PMOI, as the largest Muslim revolutionary organization, to endorse religious discrimination and demarcation or remain silent in the face of the elimination and suppression of followers of other beliefs. But the PMOI never gave in.
A few months before Khomeini’s statements, Iranian Resistance leader Massoud Rajavi had explicitly emphasized that the PMOI’s interpretation of Islam was entirely different from Khomeini’s Islam, particularly regarding freedom, the right of the people to govern, exploitation, evolution, dialectics, and the rights of nationalities, especially the Kurds, as well as misogynistic hijab rules. Even earlier, the PMOI had not voted for the constitution of the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist (Velayat-e Faqih) and had condemned Khomeini’s inhumane Qisas (retribution in kind) law as inhumane and un-Islamic.
This devotion to freedom and uncompromising stance on the right of the Iranian people to sovereignty has been the principle that has guided the PMOI from day one to the present.
From the day the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, forced PMOI founders to choose between execution or abandoning their principles, to the day Khomeini presented the PMOI with the same dilemma of disgrace or death, to which the PMOI responded: “What choice remains but to write and submit our wills?”
From the 1988 massacre, where PMOI prisoners brought Khomeini’s Death Committee and executioners like Ebrahim Raisi to their knees, insisting on their stance of striving to overthrow the regime and fighting for the freedom of the people, to this day when the PMOI’s Secretary General states:
“This historic and uncompromising resistance will not be satisfied with anything less than the overthrow of the entirety of the mullahs’ regime and will not be satisfied with anything less than the establishment of freedom, democracy, and equality.” (Zahra Merrikhi – September 6, 2023).