Source: Reuters Blog
Author: Bernd Debusmann
As the clock ticks towards the end of America’s military presence in Iraq, there are increasingly dire warnings of a humanitarian disaster unless steps are taken to protect more than 3,000 Iranian dissidents living in a camp in Iraq. How closely is Washington listening?
Gloomy forecasts for the fate of the exiles at Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad near the border with Iran, have come from Amnesty International, a long string of prominent former U.S. government officials, retired generals, and members of the European Parliament. One of them, Struan Stevenson, predicts “a Srebrenica-style massacre,” a reference to the 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian War.
Stevenson, who is head of the European Parliament’s delegation on Iraq, issued his warning this week in an op-ed in the conservative Washington Times newspaper. Also this week, Amnesty International said there was a “serious risk of severe human rights violations” if the Iraqi government went ahead with plans to force the closure of the camp by the end of December.
Categories: Human Rights, Iraq, United States
International News Coverage usually cannot go very deep. Therefore most readers may not know who are the ‘refugees at Camp Ashraf’. In fact they are the ‘Mujahedeen’ who fought against the Islamic republic of Iran. Whether you call them freedom fighters or terrorists depends on your point of view, definitely they are militants. Even the US (who has made use of them in the past) considers them as a terrorist group. In addition they have become a sort of ‘sect like’ organization with strong leadership terrorizing its own followers. They are preventing even those who want to leave from leaving the camp. Some of the camp-inmates even have foreign passports (such as from Sweden) and could easily leave, but do not want to as they are blind followers of the leadership. The first condition of any asylum is that one should refrain from militant and political activities. The leadership has refused and says they would only move to a country which would allow them to continue to exist as a militant and political group. No country has agreed of course… Just for additional information…
Strange happenings in Baghdad: Already more than one year ago the American Embassy called a meeting of all Embassies to ask: ‘How many of the ‘refugees’ of the Arafat Camp are you willing to take in? All of the Ambassadors looked at the Americans, asking ‘how many are you going to take?’ At that meeting anyway the Americans did not answer. The Europeans said that first of all we will take anyone who might already have relatives in our country, which actually are quite a few. However, in spite of efforts actually most of them did not ask for asylum (see my comments above).
Iran itself said that they would take back those that did not commit any direct crimes (such as terrorist attacks). That would be quite a number as many years have passed and many children were actually born in the Camps and are innocent.