PRNewswire

Iranian-Americans participate in a rally outside the White House to support the protection of Camp Ashraf in Iraq, which houses 3,400 members of the Iranian opposition party, MEK. The event was planned to coincide with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's visit with President Barack Obama on December 12, 2011. (Erin Sutherland/MCT via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The US Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents (USCCAR) deplores Washington Post’s editorial (“A U.S. plan to save Iranians who remain in Iraq”, Dec. 14), endorsing a US plan for relocation of 3,400 residents of Camp Ashraf to an Iraqi-run de facto detention center near Baghdad’s International airport, formerly known as Camp Liberty.

The insidious piece, replete with double-entendre and mixing of absolutely no facts and lots of fiction, is effectively a farewell gift to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on his way back to Baghdad, to set in motion the plan for the massacre of Camp Ashraf residents. The Post is suggesting to have the lives of these Iranians under the control of Maliki, a man, who David Ignatius of the Post has described as “the conspirator turned chief executive” and a “backroom plotter,” whose “own Dawa Party bombed the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait in 1983.”

The editorial’s case about relocation of the residents to such a detention center as the best plan to end this humanitarian crisis peacefully is at best wishful thinking. It is an extremely dangerous suggestion that could prepare the ground for yet another Srebrenica-style massacre. Without any practical and actionable guarantees by the international community, nothing would deter the Iraqi forces of al-Maliki from repeating the massacres they perpetrated in July 2009 and April 2011, killing 47 residents – including eight women – and wounding 1070. To cover its bloody tracks, the Iraqi government, with the help of the US Embassy, has blocked any investigation into these crimes – as UN had demanded – by the US and European Union parliamentary fact-finding missions.

In light of these killings and the three-year illegal and barbaric siege of Camp Ashraf, the Post’s blindness to volume of facts all pointing to Iraq’s systematic and deliberate breach of its commitment toward Ashraf residents, and to the equally abhorring United States’ inaction in the face of Iraq’s repeated violation of its so-called written assurances to the United States, is ominously suspect.

Astonishingly, in line with Iran’s thirty-year-old policy of blaming the MEK’s leadership for whatever atrocities Iran’s ruling tyrants have committed against the organization – a ploy widely used by Maliki following the July 2009 and April 2011 attacks – the Post’s editorial, in an ultimate act of falsification, sinisterly attempts to shift the blame for an impending massacre away from Maliki – and by extension from the Obama administration – to MEK’s leadership, accusing it of making “unrealistic demands.”  We must repeat to the Post the following facts:

• Camp Ashraf residents were recognized by the United States as protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention and as such the US provided them protection until January 2009. According to article 45 of the Convention, that responsibility does not elapse if the new protecting power (Iraq since 2009) does not have the capacity and the intent to provide protection. Iraq has failed on both fronts and thus from a legal standpoint the United States, as the original protecting power, is still bound to ensure the residents’ protection whether or not it has a presence in Iraq.
 
• In 2003 and again in 2004, the United States gave written guaranteed commitment of protection to every individual in Ashraf as long as they remain in Iraq. America is, therefore, still morally and legally responsible for their safety and security.
 
• Last September, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) declared that Camp Ashraf residents have applied for refugee status and therefore, under international law as “asylum seekers” they must be able to benefit from basic protection of their security and well-being.

Against this background, the demand by Camp Ashraf residents and its leadership that “U.S. troops or U.N. peacekeeping forces provide security at the new camp,” is indeed completely “realistic” and in line with America’s promises and UNHCR’s declaration.

If the Post’s editorial finds the residents’ morally and legally justified and actionable demand “unrealistic,” then it is acting as a de facto voice of an administration that is dishonoring America by reneging on its commitment to a group of unarmed men, women and children, who in the words of Brig. Gen. David Phillips, former Commandant of U.S. Army Military Police Corps and former Senior Commanding Officer at Camp Ashraf, were vetted and completely investigated by several US agencies which were not able to find an iota of evidence linking any of them to any act of violence.

Furthermore, the Washington Post shamelessly refers to some of the most patriotic Americans as a “stable of handsomely-paid” mouthpieces of the MEK. This is astonishing as the paper itself has never wasted any time to support the misguided policy of the US State Department to designate the MEK as a terrorist organization in 1997 for purely political considerations and appeasement of the mullahs of Tehran. The designation, legally and factually discredited and revoked in the United Kingdom, France, and the European Union, and declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals as it violated the due process rights of the MEK, has been used by the Maliki government as a pretext to slaughter the residents.

Additionally, the editorial alleges that the MEK was responsible for killing Americans more than four decades ago when multiple credible independent sources have provided ample countervailing evidence that the current MEK in its entirety has had nothing to do with it.

The Washington Post is wise to remember that history may not judge kindly its expediency in support of an administration that seeks reelection by throwing a group of innocent men and 1,000 Muslim women, who have already been victimized by the barbarism of Iraqi soldiers, into the wolves. Unfortunately, in this case of the impending humanitarian catastrophe of monumental dimension, the Post has opted to take the wrong side and has issued a license to murder the residents by blaming the victims instead of the butchers.

SOURCE:  US Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents (USCCAR)

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/usccar-strongly-condemns-washington-posts-editorial-for-giving-iraqs-maliki-license-to-murder-camp-ashraf-residents-135674098.html

CBC News

MPs say Iraq’s Camp Ashraf residents have been ‘indiscriminately massacred’

Government and opposition MPs concerned for the safety of 3,400 refugees — predominantly Iranians — facing expulsion from Iraq’s Camp Ashraf have joined forces to call for assistance from Canadian allies.

Residents are mostly members of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq of Iran, which is listed as a terrorist organization in Canada and the U.S. The group opposes the current regime in Iran.

After a deadly raid on the camp last spring, supporters fear for the safety of residents if they are forced to leave the camp. The Iraqi government wants the refugees out by Dec. 31, and its officials say they want the UN to repatriate the residents.

There are two Canadian citizens living at the camp.

A House subcommittee on human rights has been studying the situation at Camp Ashraf, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler said Wednesday morning.

“We have held a series of meetings, heard chilling testimony about the situation and dangers facing the residents in Camp Ashraf,” Cotler said.

Subcommittee members say the residents are unarmed, defenceless, and characterized as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“The citizens of Camp Ashraf have faced ongoing harassment and intimidation by the Iraqi and Iranian governments, and twice this year alone residents of the camp have been indiscriminately massacred,” the subcommittee said in a news release.

Canadians to visit camp Wednesday

Conservative MP Russ Hiebert says he has met with Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird about the issue, and says Baird has been working with Canadian allies “to pressure the Iraqi government to protect the residents of Camp Ashraf.”

Hiebert says Baird is sending Canadian officials to visit the camp on Wednesday to monitor the situation, and that Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney met with UN and Iraqi officials in Geneva.

The subcommittee passed a motion calling for Iraq to allow international observers into the camp and to extend the deadline. They’re also asking the Canadian government to push for a UN Security Council resolution to put a protective force at the camp.

“The reason that we’re gathered here from every party in the House is because we are all seized with the urgency of avoiding a possible catastrophe,” Hiebert said, calling it a precarious situation.

“Right now the lives of 3,400 people are at serious risk.”

The deadline must be extended to give the UN High Commissioner for Refugees more time to evaluate individual refugee eligibility, he said.

The MPs are also concerned the residents of Camp Ashraf could be forcibly transferred to countries where they may face persecution.

NDP MP Wayne Marston says the humanitarian need on the ground is self-evident.

“There’s just over 3,000 people at significant and immediate risk at this time.”

 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/12/14/pol-iraq-camp-ashraf.html

TORONTO SUN

They are half-a-world away and there are only seven of them, but the members of Parliament on a House of Commons human rights committee are doing whatever they can for the 3,400 refugees at Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad, who, the MPs believe, are in imminent danger.

There are two Canadians among the refugees. They remain at Ashraf voluntarily despite offers from Canadian consular officials to get them out of what could, within days, become a very dicey situation.

Last month, diplomats convinced nine other Canadians to leave the camp.

Today, Canadian officials will travel from Jordan to Camp Ashraf, at some risk to their own personal security, to check on conditions and on the two Canadians who refuse to leave.

The rest, though, are mostly Iranian refugees opposed to the ayatollahs who govern their homeland. Their political organization was created in the 1960s and is called the National Liberation Army of the Mujahedin e-Khalq or MeK.

During the Iran-Iraq war they were armed by Saddam Hussein and used by that dictator to kill many thousands of Iranians.

They are also alleged to have killed Kurds, at Hussein’s urging, and committed other violent acts in the name of their cause. But since 2001, those at Camp Ashraf have given up their weapons.

Nonetheless, they are, above all else, enemies of the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But Iran’s president has a new friend in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and, as soon as U.S. forces withdraws all its troops from Iraq at the end of the year, Maliki — many experts will tell you — will hand those 3,400 refugees and enemies of Ahmadinejad over to Ahmadinejad himself.

“They will face the prison and the gallows (and) the fight for democracy in Iran will take a severe blow,” Wes Martin told this small group of Canadian MPs last week. Martin is a retired U.S. marine colonel who was once the commander of Camp Ashraf while it was under U.S. control.

So why doesn’t the U.S. or its allies in the West save these 3,400 refugees?

We won’t because officially the MeK are all terrorists. Officially, we think they’re the bad guys because of those violent acts committed a generation or more ago.

Canada has designated the MeK as a terrorist organization since 2005 and just re-affirmed that status in 2010. The U.S. has had them on the list since 1997.

Because MeK is on the list, banks and financial institutions are required to freeze its assets. Listing also prohibits all persons in Canada, as well as Canadians abroad, from knowingly dealing with this entity and its assets.

Martin — whose other job in Iraq was being in charge of all anti-terrorism operations for the entire U.S. military — thinks we’ve got it backwards.

“I cannot say with enough emphasis that the MeK is not a terrorist organization,” Martin told MPs. “As a matter of fact, I found just the opposite when I was commander of Camp Ashraf, and they were my allies.”

Scott Reid, the Conservative MP who chairs this human rights committee, and all his MP colleagues had trouble Tuesday squaring Martin’s assessment with evaluations provided to them by Canadian bureaucrats who had never visited Ashraf.

“They’re just people,” he told his committee Tuesday. “They’re probably going to be dead people pretty soon. That’s our worry.”

 http://www.torontosun.com/2011/12/13/refugees-or-terrorists-theyll-soon-be-dead

San Jose Mercury News

Iranian journalist Asieh Rakhshani, who lived in Richmond and Albany for most of her childhood, was killed April 8 in a raid in Camp Ashraf in Iraq during a clash with Iraqi forces. ((Courtesy of Hamid Yazdanpanah))

For years, a Bay Area couple had been trying to publicize the danger that dissidents from their native Iran faced at a camp across the border in Iraq. Then, in April, Parviz and Ensieh Yazdanpanah’s greatest fear came true in a very personal way: Their adopted daughter was one of three dozen unarmed people killed at Camp Ashraf by Iraqi troops.

A family photo album that includes childhood pictures of birthday parties ends with the images of 30-year-old Asieh Rakhshani bleeding to death in an Ashraf hospital.

“She died hoping for peace and freedom in the region,” her mother said, breaking into tears.

On Monday, the couple and hundreds of others from the Bay Area’s Iranian-American community again raised their voices in protest in front of the White House, where President Barack Obama welcomed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the man whom the Yazdanpanahs accuse of ordering the attack on the camp that killed their daughter.

Rakhshani, who was training to be a journalist, had returned to Iraq to volunteer at the camp. When Iraqi troops attacked April 8, firing into crowds, she captured it on video.

In the video, “you can hear her voice shouting, ‘Allahu akbar,’ ” or “God is great,” her mother said. Then Rakhshani witnessed the shooting of a friend nearby. “Her friend next to her fell, and she’s screaming, ‘They shot her! They shot her!’ … While she was shouting, they shot her, and the camera rolled off her hand.”

Facing a bloodbath

Camp Ashraf is home to a now-disarmed Iranian militia that once waged war on Iran with the support of Saddam Hussein. With the rise of an Iraqi government with close ties to Tehran, the people in the camp are in an increasingly precarious position. Complicating their fate, the organization that controls the camp is listed by the U.S. as a terrorist organization and described by many as a cult.

But the Yazdanpanah family says the 3,400 people at Camp Ashraf are facing a bloodbath if the Iraqi government follows through on plans to forcibly close it by the end of the year.

“Their goal is to take them one by one, put them in a bigger jail inside Iraq, and from there deport them to Iran,” said Ensieh Yazdanpanah, 50, of El Sobrante. “And if that happens, we know they’re going to be killed. They’re going to be tortured, and they’re going to be killed.”

She said a few thousand Iranian-Americans, including about 500 from the Bay Area, showed up at Monday’s protest, at which former FBI Director Louis Freeh and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge spoke in support of extending the Dec. 31 deadline for the camp to close.

The residents of Ashraf are members of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI, also known as MEK for its Farsi initials), a group that arose in 1965 in opposition to Shah Reza Pahlavi and later fought the clerics who overthrew him in 1979. The group has often been described as having a Marxist/Islamic ideology, but members say it favors democracy, freedom and religious tolerance in an Iran free of nuclear weapons.

Detractors say the group engages in cultlike practices under its leaders, husband-and-wife team Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, which include forced divorces and tape-recorded sessions of self-criticism designed to ensure loyalty. Older members were reportedly forced to divorce in the late 1980s, and younger members are said to have been pressured into vows of celibacy.

The PMOI moved its headquarters to Iraq in 1986, during the Iran-Iraq War, and Saddam allowed the group to build Camp Ashraf, 65 miles north of Baghdad, and helped to finance and arm its attacks on Iran. The militia is widely believed to have aided Saddam in the brutal suppression of uprisings by Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiites in southern Iraq in 1991, a charge it denies.

Charges of cultism

Half of the group’s fighters and most of its commanders were women, according to a New York Times Magazine writer, Elizabeth Rubin, who visited Ashraf in 2003. She described them as an “army of Stepford wives,” robotic and adoring of their leaders, and portrayed the movement as “bizarre” and cultish, with children nurtured from birth to be fanatically loyal.

The U.S. State Department designated the PMOI a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, primarily citing its attacks against Iran. The European Union removed the group from its terror list in 2009, and its U.S. status has been under legal challenge for years.

Supporters say the group has long renounced militant activity. It gave up its weapons in 2003 in exchange for U.S. protection.

But the U.S. had transferred control of the camp to Iraq by April, when the attack came that killed Rakhshani.

The Yazdanpanah family adopted the girl as a young child when her real parents, who were living at Ashraf, asked them to take her in for her safety. She grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Albany High School but returned to Ashraf in 1999.

“My sister made a choice to return to her parents, when she had every opportunity to live a free and easy life in the United States,” said her adoptive brother, Hamid Yazdanpanah, a 25-year-old attorney in San Francisco. “Instead, she chose a path of hardship and resistance. … My sister died working as an amateur journalist trying to document the oppression and massacre of innocent people.”

http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_19532354

CNN

Washington (CNN) — Several prominent Americans joined Iranian opposition activists Monday in a noisy demonstration outside the White House, urging President Obama to discuss what may soon happen at a refugee camp as the United States leaves Iraq.

Masked demonstrators rally Monday outside the White House to protest plans to close a refugee camp in Iraq. CNN

The Iraqi government plans to close Camp Ashraf northeast of Baghdad at the end of December, without clear assurances the refugees will be protected against attacks by Iraqi forces and reprisals from neighboring Iran.

The camp is home to more than 3,000 people described as Iranian resistance figures and their sympathizers. The group, known as MEK or the People’s Mujahidin of Iran, has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization. Some GOP lawmakers are calling on the Obama administration to lift that designation and officials say that is under review.

The demonstrators rallied as Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with President Obama at the White House.

Among those leading the rally was former U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli, a Democrat from New Jersey.

“When President Obama welcomed Mr. Maliki to the White House he may have noticed something,” Torricelli told the crowd. “When he took his hand back, there was blood on it.”

Torricelli said, “That is the blood of the innocent people of Camp Ashraf.” Torricelli said he believes they have been tortured and killed by Iraqi forces under the Maliki regime.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge followed Torricelli to offer a simple plea as the Iraqi leader met with Obama, “to insist that the Maliki government extend the deadline, to ensure the protection of the 3,400 residents of Camp Ashraf.”

The group believes the current regime in Iraq, under orders from al-Maliki, has twice staged deadly attacks that have killed nearly 50 people. When word of such an attack in April came out, it was described as a “massacre” by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts.

Since 2004, the United States has considered the residents of Camp Ashraf “noncombatants” and “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions. A United Nations commission on refugees has described those at Camp Ashraf as “formal asylum seekers” against persecution by the regime in Iran.

U.S. forces have handed security of Camp Ashraf to the Iraqi government as American forces depart.

Those at the rally outside the White House on Monday suggested Iran is hoping al-Maliki and Iraq will expose thousands of people opposed to the government in Tehran by closing the camp and not providing safeguards.

Some called for a United Nations-led force of “blue helmets” to provide security for those living at the camp.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/12/politics/iraqi-refugee-camp-protest/index.html

RTTNews 

White House Rally Calls on Obama for Protection of Iranian Dissidents in Camp Ashraf

Hundreds of protesters gathered Monday outside the White House gates ahead of a meeting here between President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The crowd called on Obama to help protect those at Camp Ashraf, home to 3,400 Iranian dissidents in Iraq.

Demonstrators said they fear that with U.S. combat forces leaving Iraq the al-Maliki government will evict the Iranian exiles from Camp Ashraf and deport them back to Iran, where they could face almost-certain death for their opposition to government leaders in the Islamic republic.

Located just 60-miles from the Iraqi border with Iran, Camp Ashraf has been the site of alleged human rights abuses. The unarmed dissidents have been attacked twice by Iraqi military forces. Nine exiles were killed in July 2009; this year, 36 were killed in April.

Dozens of members of Congress have urged Obama to use his meeting with al-Maliki to press for the protection of the dissidents.

by RTT Staff Writer

http://www.rttnews.com/Content/PoliticalNews.aspx?Node=B1&Id=1779501

AFP

BAGHDAD – European states should agree to accept members of an exiled Iranian group whose base in Iraq is being threatened with closure at year-end, the United Nations’ special envoy to Baghdad said on Monday.

Martin Kobler also called for the Iraqi government to extend the date of the closure of Camp Ashraf, which has been home to several thousand members of the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI) since the 1980s.

“I appeal to the governments of all UN member states, however in particular to the Europeans, to take Camp Ashraf residents into their countries,” Kobler told AFP following a ceremony to mark International Human Rights Day, which was on December 10.

Kobler said that in addition to “nationals of European countries [living] in Camp Ashraf,” there were around 900 people claiming to have documents relating them in some way to European nationals.

“I hope they will… because there is a danger of confrontation and violence,” he added.

Camp Ashraf, which has become a mounting international problem, has been in the spotlight since a deadly April raid on the camp by Iraqi security forces.

The camp was set up when Iraq and Iran were at war in the 1980s by the PMOI and later came under US control until January 2009, when US forces transferred security for the camp to Iraq.

The PMOI has been on the US government terrorist list since 1997.

Kobler also called for Iraqi authorities to extend what is currently a year-end deadline for the camp’s closure, arguing that “we will not be able to move several thousand people by the end of the year.”

“We are in the middle of negotiations … to bring about a peaceful and durable solution to the problem,” he said, adding: “I will fight until the last day, 31st of December, to bring about a peaceful and durable solution.”

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArchiveDetails.aspx?ID=341886