UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

BRUSSELS — The EU and United States must take in ailing and wounded inmates from a camp in Iraq housing thousands of Iranian dissidents, the leader of an Iranian opposition group said Tuesday.

“I urge the European Union and the United States to immediately accept a certain number of sick and wounded residents” from Camp Ashraf,” Maryam Rajavi, who heads the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said on the sidelines of a meeting at the European parliament in Brussels.

“Any delay in this regard is unacceptable and unjustifiable,” she told AFP.

There are some 3,400 Iranians living in Ashraf, home for the past 30 years to Iranian dissidents, who are now facing expulsion as Baghdad wants to close down the camp.

The camp was set up when Iraq and Iran were at war in the 1980s by the then Iranian People’s Mujahedeen, which joined forces with the Iraqis to fight the Tehran government.

The camp came under US control until January 2009, when US forces transferred security for the camp to Iraq.

The camp’s residents are being assessed individually by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees after applying for refugee status, to allow them to resettle elsewhere, but fears are that the process cannot be completed within the time-frame set by Baghdad.

Under a pact signed on December 25 between the United Nations and the Iraqi government, the residents of camp Ashraf will be transferred to Camp Liberty, another site near Baghdad.

The People’s Mujahedeen has said it will only accept a move to Camp Liberty if this did not involve prison-like conditions.

“The EU, the US and the UN must intervene actively and immediately to prevent Camp Liberty from being transformed into a prison,” said Rajavi, adding that residents there must be free to come and go freely.

Her organisation says there is no potable water in the camp and that residents are not allowed to leave freely or have access to lawyers and doctors.

Daniel Fried, the US diplomat in charge of the Camp Ashraf issue, called on the People’s Mujahedeen to move to the new temporary home in accordance with the December 25 agreement.

Fried said that the United States was informed that an Iraqi representative held “businesslike and productive” discussions with the People’s Mujahedeen on Monday about the move.

“The United States welcomes this progress and we look forward to the first residents moving from Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya (Liberty) in the immediate future,” Fried told reporters on a conference call from Washington.

“The residents of Camp Ashraf must make the decision to start this relocation process. Camp Ashraf is no longer a viable home for them. They have no secure future there,” he said.

“The government of Iraq has committed itself to the security of the people at Camp Hurriya and is aware that the United States expects it to fulfill its responsibility,” he said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hMW_oWblVkbYYcvCYd360MHXdFSQ

THE HUFFINGTON POST

Once again the plight of Camp Ashraf attracts international attention. The issue: a statement published by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), headed by Ambassador Martin Kobler, calling on residents to move to Camp Liberty.

According to the statement, Camp Liberty – an abandoned US base near Baghdad airport – is now in compliance with “international humanitarian standards” for housing “5.500 people”. Human rights experts however point to serious shortcomings.

Following last year’s brutal massacre of dozens of defenceless refugees at Ashraf by the Iraqi army, which brought swift international condemnations, Iraq quickly announced a deadline to shut down Camp Ashraf by 31 December 2011. The residents had no option but to leave the country, Iraq said.

Since last September, UN’s refugee body (UNHCR) has been ready to start the Refugee Status Determination process of the over 3000 “asylum-seekers” at Camp Ashraf. The process, however, never started as Iraq barred UNHCR from doing interviews inside or even nearby Ashraf.

It further emerged that Iraq had no intention of speeding up departures from Ashraf to third countries. Instead, it was implementing Tehran’s instructions for setting impossible conditions to obtain another excuse to launch attacks on Ashraf when the deadline would expire. Ashraf houses members of the most devoted and long-lasting opposition to the mullahs’ rule, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

UN Secretary General’s Special Representative, Martin Kobler, was tasked to find a “peaceful solution” to the drama. He proposed Camp Liberty as a temporary relocation for Ashraf residents so that the UNHCR would start the interviews. Iraq extended the deadline to April 2012 on condition that people would move to Liberty promptly. A group of 400 residents declared themselves ready to move to Liberty with their movable property to test Iraq’s intentions.

But it became increasingly clear that no sincere intention to facilitate the refugee process existed from the Iraqi side. The real plan seems to be initiated from Tehran to create a detention centre to further distress and hopefully breakdown the persistent Iranian dissidents.

In a statement on 25 January, the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe called ‘Don’t turn Camp Liberty into a prison for Ashraf residents’.

The initial 40 square km area of Camp Liberty had been reduced to only half a square km. The area is being encircled by 3.6 meter high concrete walls. The residents or their legal representation are not allowed to visit the camp in advance.

Furthermore, vehicles or other movable property beyond travel bags are not allowed to be taken in. There’s no access to lawyers or medical services. No face-to-face or 24-hour access to UN observers as it had been suggested before. Armed security forces will have permanent presence inside the camp. All entrees and exits are controlled by the army. Freedom of movement is nonexistent.

“Any relocation outside Camp (Ashraf) proceed on a voluntary basis, with freedom of movement the most desirable state at the site of relocation,” the UNHCR said in a statement on 1 February highlighting the shortcoming of UNAMI’s statement.

“It’s not a transit camp; it’s not a refugee settlement; it’s a detention centre, a prison!” Guy Goodwin-Gill, Professor of International Refugee Law at Oxford University stressed during a conference in Westminster 31 January. “Such conditions are poor, nothing short of inhumane and should not be endorsed by Ambassador Kobler,” he declared in a separate statement.

But during a press conference in Brussels on 2 February, Kobler again reiterated his proposal. “It requires a voluntary decision by Camp Ashraf residents to relocate from Camp Ashraf to Liberty.”

“There are two options for camp Ashraf residents: To stay in Ashraf…but this is an option which might lead to violence!..Or to use the offer of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to go to Camp Liberty,” he concluded.

In other words: Die in Ashraf or move voluntarily to a prison!

“Kobler is acting like a salesman trying to sell an imperfect package with no guarantees,” a source close to the negotiations said.

While it is a well-known principle that UN officials do not sit down and discuss the condition of an asylum-seeker with a government that he or she has escaped from, Mr Kobler has made no secret of his good contacts with the Iranian Ambassador over Ashraf.

“I am in close contacts with Iranian authorities,” Kobler was quoted by the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine on 4 February. “I am confident that many (residents) will go back to Iran,” he claimed.

“Who gave him authority to speak for our loved ones?” Saeed Fathi, exiled-Iranian lawyer who has relatives in Ashraf said. “This is an insult to their dignity!”

Mr Kobler got explicit backing from UN, EU and US to solve the Ashraf crises. His failure to use that power to convince Iraq to uphold basic human rights standards at Camp Liberty is therefore seen as very unfortunate.

“Yet another ‘Done Deal’ just as he did with the MoU and the UNAMI statement,” Fathi deplored. “Issuing press releases decorated with words such as ‘humanitarian standards’ to cover up the human rights shortcoming is simply immoral.”

Abbas Rezai is a Human Rights and Foreign Policy Writer

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/abbas-rezai/voluntary-imprisonment-at_b_1256279.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The US Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents (USCCAR), representing thousands of Iran-Americans whose loved-ones reside in Camp Ashraf, Iraq, condemns the reckless and potentially harmful assertions made in the January 31 statement issued by Ambassador Martin Kobler, head of United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Iraq.

USCCAR warns that Mr. Kobler should not become a part and parcel of a despicable joint Iranian-Iraqi “working plan” aimed at dismantling Iran’s principal organized opposition, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) whose 3,400 members and their families currently reside in Ashraf.

Mr. Kobler must be reminded that last September, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) formally recognized the residents of Ashraf as “asylum seekers,” a status which, according to UNHCR, entitles them to certain rights and protections based on international humanitarian standards. In its February 1, 2012 statement, UNHCR once again described all residents of Ashraf as “persons of concern.”

While Ambassador Kobler has made a great deal about the number of toilets and faucets at Camp Liberty, he has failed to mention that humanitarian standards at the Camp – including the right to freedom of movement and access to lawyers and medical services – are effectively non-existent.

In addition, the Camp Liberty is encircled with thick 12-feet high concrete walls and surrounded by the Iraqi military forces. The residents will not have in-person round-the-clock access to UN observers, who will be stationed outside the Camp perimeter while Iraqi police will be inside. The residents are not even permitted to take their vehicles and moveable belongings.

In its February 1st statement, UNHCR attached “utmost importance to peaceful solutions being found.” The UN Refugee Agency further emphasized that any relocation outside Camp Ashraf must proceed on a voluntary basis, “with freedom of movement the most desirable state at the site of relocation.” UNHCR did not certify Camp Liberty in its statement but said it only “has been advising on the technicalities of improving the camp infrastructure.”

Mr. Kobler’s impartiality is a must when dealing with the lives of 3,400 defenseless asylum seekers. However, his actions have made a fait accompli situation designed to force the residents of Ashraf into “voluntarily” accepting the relocation terms crafted by Tehran and set forward by the Iraqi government. 

SOURCE: US Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents (USCCAR)

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/usccar-deplores-reckless-decisions-by-unamis-chief-on-camp-ashraf-138578039.html

THE OFFICIAL WIRE

The Iranian Dissidents living in Camp Ashraf in Iraq are to be relocated to a new camp near the Baghdad airport. The matter has been a shock and badly troubling for the 3300 persons living in the camp, for the simple reason that they are being forced to leave the place they have lived in for more than 20 years. Furthermore, the information received about the new camp, where the Iranian civilians are to be relocated to, seems to be changing and becoming more disturbing everyday.

The residents were first told that the new location, Camp Liberty, which used to be a base for American soldiers, had the advantage of being large enough to locate the 3400 dissidents. This was despite the fact that the base was a desert-like place hardly suitable for men and women civilians. This information however, was soon proved to be wrong and the Iraqi government decided to force the men and women in the camp to much smaller place. The first information was that the camp was of an area of 40 sq km. However, they were later told that only 0.6 sq km of the new camp will be available to them and four meter walls will be put around the camp. No-one would be allowed to leave or enter the camp either. This no doubt reminds everyone of the concentration camps used by the Nazi regime for its opponents.

Looking at the history of the term concentration camp, one cannot help noticing the resemblances which exist.  At the time, Hitler ordered to have his opponents physically concentrated in one place, and that is where the word concentration camp came from. One can also read in the history books that the term concentration camp referred to a camp in which people were detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

Sadly, these are the very conditions that the Iranian dissidents have been subjected to and the conditions have continuously become worse during the past year. The residents in Camp Ashraf are in fact intellectuals who have decided to stand up against the fundamentalist regime in Iran and demand democracy and freedom. But the fact is that they are receiving a harsh treatment from the international institutions, which are supposed to defend their rights. 

We know today that the 3300 exiles would only be permitted to occupy a tiny corner of Camp Liberty, barely quarter of a mile square, which had been completely looted, was without running water and around which the Iraqis were erecting a 15ft concrete wall. Far from being offered a safe haven, it seemed, they were to await their fate crammed into what the European Council last week denounced as “a prison”, watched inside and out by armed Iraqi and Iranian guards.
  Worst of all is that the UN representative, who is following the events on behalf of the United Nations Secretary General, is not helping the matter either.  The happenings are indeed outrageous and cannot be accepted in the 21^st century. As many humanitarian figures, including the archbishop of Wales have re-iterated: “This is totally unacceptable. How could 3,400 people, including 1,000 women, be located in such a small area?”

The new camp is about 40 times smaller that the area that the dissidents have lived in up until now, and the issue has thus become one that can easily lead to another act of genocide.

Kambiz Assai is a former political prisoner and a human rights activist in the UK.

http://news.officialwire.com/main.php?action=posted_news&rid=313650

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

The week before Christmas, I reported on what appeared to be a fast-looming tragedy. In Iraq, 3,300 unarmed Iranian exiles, who had lived since the 1980s at Camp Ashraf, a neat town they built in the desert near the Iranian border, were being threatened with massacre on December 31.

The threat was issued by Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, acting in conjunction with Iran’s murderous Revolutionary Guards, who regard the People’s Mujahideen of Iran (the PMOI), part of the National Council for Resistance in Iran, as their most hated enemies. As the deadline neared, following intense diplomatic activity, not least by the US government (which gave a written guarantee of protection to each of the Ashraf residents in 2003, in return for the surrender of their arms), the UN signed an agreement with the Iraqi government, brokered by the UN’s special representative in Iraq, Martin Kolber, a former German diplomat.

The Ashraf residents would be transferred to Camp Liberty, a former US base covering 25 square miles near Baghdad, from where the UN would arrange their transfer to third countries. On Christmas Day, this was welcomed by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

It then emerged, however, that the 3,300 exiles would only be permitted to occupy a tiny corner of Camp Liberty, barely quarter of a mile square, which had been completely looted, was without running water and around which the Iraqis were erecting a 15ft concrete wall. They would not be allowed to bring vehicles or personal belongings, or leave the camp. Far from being offered a safe haven, it seemed, they were to await their fate crammed into what the European Council last week denounced as “a prison”, watched inside and out by armed Iraqi and Iranian guards.

As scandalous as anything in the past month has been the part played by the UN’s Mr Kolber who, far from protesting at this betrayal, met in Baghdad with the Iranian ambassador, himself a senior Revolutionary Guards commander. After the meeting he announced first that 750, then 1,250, of the exiles were willing to return to Iran. There is nothing they could dread more, since they know that they would either be imprisoned or killed. But Kobler’s claim has been trumpeted by Tehran as a victory, and the deadly impasse remains.

General David Phillips, the former head of the US Military Police, who gave the Ashraf residents those personal guarantees of their safety, has expressed his anguish at these developments. He has now been joined in protesting at the betrayal by an array of distinguished international figures, including Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.

But on what authority could a UN official become party to this inhuman deal? And why does our Government appear to condone what is going on? The Foreign Office recently confirmed to me that they still regard the PMOI as terrorists, despite being told in 2008 that they must remove it from their list of proscribed terrorist organisations, when Lord Chief Justice Philips ruled that they had been unable to produce a shred of evidence to justify this. What dark game are they all playing – in our name?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9045657/How-I-woke-up-to-the-untruths-of-Barack-Obama.html

Remarks attributed to the UN’s top diplomat in Iraq have handed Tehran a propaganda coup by suggesting Camp Ashraf dissidents want to return to Iran, writes a member of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom

In 1942, in the middle of World War Two, a well-intentioned senior European diplomat went to meet a top Gestapo general to discuss the fate of thousands of Jews who had fled Nazi occupation to seek refuge in a neighbouring country. After the meeting, the general announced that the diplomat had told him that a large number of the Jews had become weary of being away from their motherland and were looking forward to going back to the “warmth” of their country – even under Nazi rule.

The story sounded farfetched, but the gloating Gestapo man insisted that the conversation took place. The European diplomat, for unexplained reasons, was not inclined to deny it, though it was evident that he had provided propaganda fodder to the Nazis. In reality, the tale was farfetched. Such a meeting never took place, to the best of our knowledge.

Now fast forward 70 years. Something very analogous to this story is taking place – and this time it is bitter reality, not a tale. It involves the fate of 3,400 Iranian dissidents in Camp Ashraf, Iraq, members of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, the principal Iranian opposition movement. These Iranians fled the ruthless rule of the clerical regime and took refuge in Camp Ashraf, across the border. Following the American led occupation of Iraq, Ashraf residents disarmed to the United States voluntarily. In return, every resident signed an agreement with the Americans guaranteeing his or her protection until final disposition.

Troubles for Ashraf residents began when the US turned over the security of the camp to Iraqis in 2009. Iraqi forces, acting at the behest of the Iranian regime, have killed 47 of the defenceless residents and wounded more than 1,000 in two massacres. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s arbitrary deadline to close Ashraf by the end of 2011 set the stage for a humanitarian catastrophe, but it was revoked in the final days of December due to international pressure.

Subsequently – with guarantees for the safety and wellbeing of the residents by the US Secretary of State and the United Nations – Maryam Rajavi, the charismatic leader of Iranian dissidents, prevented another massacre and persuaded the residents to move to Camp Liberty, a former US military base near Baghdad, under constant United Nations monitoring. The government of Iraq also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UN to that effect.

But Maliki, under orders from Tehran, has been reneging on the agreement. Camp Liberty has been looted; it has no running water, no electricity, no infrastructure, and Iraq has reduced the allocated size from 40 square kilometres to one square kilometre. It also is erecting walls that would turn Camp Liberty into a virtual concentration camp. All the while, the UN and the Special Representative of the Secretary General to Iraq, Ambassador Martin Kobler, have not objected.

Now comes the perplexing part. On January 22, the mullahs’ regime, in its media, quoted its ambassador to Iraq Hassan DanaiiFar, a senior commander of the notorious Revolutionary Guards – our modern Gestapo – as saying that he met with Kobler and was told that : “In meetings that the UN representative has had with members of this grouplet in Camp Ashraf, the majority of members…declared readiness to return to Iran but the terrorist commanders of this grouplet have not let them out of the camp and somehow have taken the members hostage.”

The mullahs’ ambassador said that the UN ambassador told him that at least 750 Ashraf residents are willing to go back to the mullahs’ rule. Many questions come to mind immediately. If the mission of the UN is solely humanitarian and to save the Ashraf residents, does the UN envision a humanitarian role for Iran in dealing with its arch enemies? It is the old fox and the henhouse story. According to the residents, the UN ambassador has only met Ashraf residents for 15 minutes. How was he able to make such an assessment that 750 of the residents want to go to their executioners?

The Iranian state press has had a field day with the remarks attributed to the UN’s top diplomat in Iraq. Actually, since the UN ambassador has not denied these remarks attributed to him, Tehran is inflating the original figures and the Fars news agency, on January 24, quoted the mullahs’ ambassador as claiming that he had been told that 1,260 of the residents are eager to go back to the mullahs. Further silence by the UN ambassador only allows Tehran to further exaggerate the figure.

Every day that goes by without a denial by Kobler increases the shadow of doubt. The ambassador should know that this would make his mandate murky. The UN Charter stipulates that one of its aims is to achieve international cooperation in “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms.” Assuming that this could be done by playing into the hands of an oppressor regime like the mullahs’ is not moral, ethical, or defensible. It is foolhardy and would cost lives of innocent people.

Lord King of West Bromwich is a member of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom

http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/1416/un-hands-iran-propaganda-coup-over-ashraf-dissidents