NCRI – Former US presidential candidate Howard Dean has accused America and the United Nations of being ‘all talk and no action’ in their failure to address the plight of Iranian residents of the Camp Liberty refugee camp in Iraq.
He branded Liberty a ‘prison camp’ where innocent people were dying because of ‘bureaucratic incompetence’ and said it was time for the US and the UN to keep its promises to those languishing there.
Mr Dean – also a former chairman of the US Democratic Party – was speaking at an international conference in Paris on Saturday (Feb 2).
He praised progress over the past two years in removing the Iranian resistance from the American, Canadian, Australian and European terror lists.
But he called on the US and the UN to now follow up its words with swift action to help those imprisoned at Liberty.
He told delegates: “It is not enough to say that you are going to protect those who are fighting for human rights. You must do something to protect those who are fighting for human rights.
“And the risk for those at supposed Camp Liberty is that we will not support our own convictions with our actions.
“It is not sufficient to talk if you are world leader, you must act.”
More than 3,100 Iranian dissidents, who the US disarmed with a promise to protect, were now sitting in what amounted to a prison camp near Baghdad, Mr Dean said.
He added: “America has a primary responsibility to make sure that those people are relocated and relocated now out of Iraq.
“Because if those people are killed by the Iraqis, that is not only the responsibility of the Iraqi regime, it is the responsibility of an American regime that did not keep its promises.”
The residents of Camp Ashraf were asked to move to Liberty with a promise that they would be relocated to safe countries, Mr Dean said.
But he went on: “So far five people have been relocated. We can do better than that and we must do better than that and the United Nations must do better than that.
“If the United Nations is too slow there will be people who pay with their lives. That is not acceptable and if that happens I may join those people on the other side of the aisle who believe the United Nations appropriations ought to be cut if they can’t do their job.
“I am a patient man, but I will not stand for innocent people losing their lives because of bureaucratic incompetency.
“Bureaucracy is not an excuse for murder. And murder is on the mind of the Iraqi government and the Iranian government, and we need to do better.”
Mr Dean said he echoed the remarks of American ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson, who called the Iranian regime the ‘greatest danger on the face of the earth’.
Iran also had the distinction of being tied with North Korea for having the worst human rights record on the earth, he said.
And he continued: “This is a regime that supports terrorism everywhere, thousands of Americans have died at the hands of this regime, not to mention tens of thousands of others and hundreds of thousands of Iranians.”
Mr Dean praised the ‘extraordinary speech’ of resistance leader Maryam Rajavi to the conference, and asked: “Who do you think should be president of Iran, Ahmadinejad or Madame Rajavi?
“And I repeat the extraordinary quote that Madame Rajavi used, from the mother of the Iranian blogger who was murdered, that he was a lion and that you are cowards.
“But I will add something. For each Iranian blogger, just as for every son and daughter of the revolution that took place over 200 years ago in my country, for each one that’s murdered by the Iranian secret police, there will be five more and then five more after that until Iran is free.”
