NCRI – In an international conference held in Geneva on Thursday, September 22 by the Swiss Committee in Defense of Ashraf, prominent European and American dignitaries and personalities expressed their deep concerns about intentions of the Iranian regime and the Iraqi government against residents of Ashraf and especially the illegally set deadline of December 2011 for closing the camp. The conference called on the UN Secretary General, the UN High Commission for Refugees and UN High Commission for Human Rights as well as the United States to take immediate measures to provide protection for Camp Ashraf and prevent repeat of similar massacres of the past and also press the Iraqi government to cancel the 2011 deadline until the resettlement to third countries of all residents is finalized.
Below is speech by Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
Thank you very much Madam Radjavi, Ladies and Gentlemen. You know this is a very important gathering because it has been said that all it takes for evil to succeed is that good people remain silent. And we have here a hall full of good people and you have heard from and will hear from good people, intelligent people who will not remain silent in the face of evil. And so as Mayor Giuliani said this evil will not succeed.
As we were leaving New York yesterday we saw the motorcades of foreign diplomats descending on the city for the general assembly with the long black cars and the SUVs and I am sure one of those motorcades, if not yesterday then certainly today was conveying Mahmud Ahmadinejad into the heart of a city of people of diverse backgrounds and creative energy. A diversity and an energy that he despises to the very core of his being so that he can strut his little moment on a stage at the United Nations, as he is doing probably at this very moment and proclaim his contempt for the country that protect him so carefully and for its values and his intent to wipe off the face of the earth the only democracy in the Middle East. And so, at a time like this we want to look around us for reasons for hope. And he is proporting I think to offer a reason for hope because he is telling people that he has released two American hikers who were unjustly convicted of spying. This has become a kind of gruesome game. You arrest people for no reason and then you release them and you claim that you’ve engaged in a humanitarian gesture when you release one, as he did last year, and then he follows up with the release of two of them this year, and tries to take credit again for humanitarian gesture. This is hostage taking, pure and simple. And it offers no reason for any hope at all that the mullahs are interested in what has been described as the spirit of the Arab Spring that is sweeping the Middle East. Well the sad fact is that that movement has begun to succeed only in authoritarian countries, not in totalitarian countries. In other words it has begun to succeed only in countries where there is a limit on the brutality that a regime is able and willing to bring to bear against dissent. But in totalitarian countries and countries where there is no such limit, and Iran tops the list of those countries, the story has not been as happy.
Back in February when Egyptians were first beginning to stir, at Friday prayers in Tehran, the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, speaking not in Farsi but in Arabic to make sure that he reached and would be understood in Cairo. Prayers what he calls this explosion of sacred anger and warned against US interference in Egypt. He claimed that events in Tahrir square were a natural extension of the 1979 revolution in Iran. He was obviously not embarrassed that in 2009 he, himself, had given the orders to put down the uprising in the streets of Tehran that actually began the Arab Spring.
Even before the Iranians went into the streets, as you know better than I, the mullahs executed anyone with a connection with Camp Ashraf where MEK residents are holding out despite the efforts of Iran and its collaborators within the Iraqi regime to drive them back to Iran or to exterminate them altogether.
I have been before you on earlier occasions when we have looked for signs that this country, that our country, my country, the United States, so despised by Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran, would bestir itself and take some concrete action to do what Ahmadinejad and those who pull his strings most oppose and fear, and that is to remove MEK from the States Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Those hopes so far have not been realized. And it seems ironic to have to say this afternoon, that the main hope for the people of Ashraf now, is the United Nations. An organization that, let’s face it, has not covered itself with glory in the struggle, will act through the UN High Commission of Refugees who has at least offered to help the residents of Ashraf get the benefit of the guarantee made to them by the United States general in 2003 that they would have the status of protected persons under the 4th Geneva Convention. And she should be in a great mood when she gets back from New York to take immediate action after witnessing the obscene parade of world dictators that constitutes the annual meeting of the general assembly.
The history of how we got here is known by many of you but nonetheless there is repeating. In the 1990 as the good will gesture towards the regime in Tehran, the government of the US placed the MEK on that list. By all accounts this was done to help us engage with the regime and perhaps get the regime to behave as a responsible member of the world community. Whether that policy was wise or foolish, there is absolutely no mistaking that it is and has been a complete and dismal failure.
The regime has grown only more hassle towards its neighbours, towards the United States, and more repressive and more destructive of its own citizens. In the administration in which I served, unfortunately the designation was continued. This time out of fear that if MEK were delisted, why the Iranians would provide weapons, including deadly IED’s to insurgence in Iraq. Well of course, that policy too is a failure because the Iranians have been providing IEDs to people in Iraq who are killing American troops all along, and they have never desisted.
The MEK has renounced violence for years. And for years before today, the MEK stands explicitly for establishing a democratic, non nuclear secular republic in Iran. Its members living in Camp Ashraf had given up the weapons they might have used to defend themselves and put themselves in the hands of coalition forces in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq. They accepted the solemn assurance of the coalition and specifically of American generals that they would be treated as protected persons under international law. Instead of pursuing violence, the MEK has put itself under the hands of the USA and its institutions and so, in addition to accepting the word of our country, that the residents of Ashraf would be protected, the MEK took to our courts to undo the unjust designation by resorting to the law. After all, if an organization cannot be treated under the law, as a foreign terrorist organization, unless it either engages in terrorism or threatens the welfare of the United States, or has the capacity and intent to do that, then the MEK, which has renounced violence and has no such intention, no such capability should have no difficulty in getting itself off that list.
And so in July of 2010, MEK won a ruling from the Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia Circuit, as the secretary of State must reconsider the designation, because the information she was relying on to continue the designation was not sufficient, was not at all convincing to the Court. Where do we stand today?
Well in Camp Ashraf, the organization that surrendered its arms and placed itself under international protection in 2003, to the point where the residents of Ashraf each received an identification card, issued by the United States, indicating that that person was a protected person. And issued only after FBI agents conducted interviews of those people and found none of them to be a terrorist.
That camp has been attacked twice by Iraqi troops.
Once in July 2009, once in April 2011, and both times, when the Secretary of Defence of the USA was in country, in Iraq, a calculated slap in the face of the USA by the country to which we gave blood and treasure to free it. And what happened in March 2011? was the murder of 35 defenceless women and men using weapons and vehicles supplied by the USA operated by troops, trained by the USA, and the USA has done absolutely nothing about it.
In fact all of the attacking from the Iraqi troops were photographed in the act of committing it.
Some in the State department actually advocated resettling Ashraf residents somewhere else in Iraq, away from the Iranian border. As if the attack somehow come from Iran? A sure way of making certain that the remaining residents of Ashraf could be obliterated completely out of the sight of the rest of the world. Indeed the Iraqis have set up new equipment outside Ashraf to jam communications, to spy on the residents, which indicates that they intend to mount another attack, but this time not to let the word get out the way it did the last time.
As I said the UN High Commissionner for Refugees has made it explicit a few days ago that the residents of Ashraf who have filed applications for refugees status are entitled to that status. An enormous amount will be achieved by backing out finding with the very simple act of raising a UN flag over Ashraf.
But again, what about the USA? What about the country that Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the civil war called the last best hope of earth? What has the US done? The European Union, the United Kingdom have acted forcefully to remove the terrorist designation from the MEK years ago. Recognizing that that designation ever was appropriate and that’s opened to doubt. It is certainly no longer.
In order to be kept on that list an organization has to be involved in terrorism at some point in the last ten years, that’s the law, and as you’ve heard there is no evidence of it.
The State department has been at this for more than a year. It has asked MEK written questions, having nothing whatsoever to do but the appropriateness of the designation and presented all kinds of irrelevant documents, and it simply dragged its feet and refused to act.
Let’s take one example that I think shows what’s going on here. One of the documents presented by the State Department was unclassified. State Department document reporting that one, State Department officials questioned Iranian expatriates applying for visas to enter the USA from such places as Ankara, Baku, Berlin, Dubai and Istanbul. Those visas applicants reported that they regarded MEK unfavourably.
Now think about that. Think about it. First of all, whether these Iranians think well over MEK is not at all relevant to whether MEK should be listed as a terrorist organization. But beyond that, the State Department is actually claiming with a straight face that when it lists MEK as a foreign terrorist organization and then asks people applying for visas from that same State Department what they think of MEK, the people they ask, applying for visas to a country that lists MEK as a foreign terrorist organization, say they have an unfavourable view of MEK.
Well how about that?
A first year college student can use this kind of evidence to support a conclusion in a term paper would get a failing grade. This is a strategy of endless delay. Repeated request from people on both sides of the political spectrum as you’ve heard. Former governors, Howard Dear in Vermont, Dick Ridges in New Mexico, both democrats, former ambassador John Balden, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani who you heard from, both republicans. Former homeland secretary Tom Ridge, also a republican, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of staff have called on the USA and ploughed our government to end this undeserved designation. And what have we heard from the State Department? On September 6th, the Secretary of State answered a letter sent in August by several of us, including Tom Ridge, former FBI director Louis Freeh, and me, urging her to act, citing the plights of the residents of Ashraf. She said simply that the designation is currently under review. And what of Ashraf? The secretary tells us that the department “shares your concern about the violence that took place”. Shares our concern about the violence that took place? How does it share that concern? The violence did not just happen, it was inflicted by Iraqi troops acting at the behest of Iran, using weapons supplied by the USA. It was not a natural disaster like an earthquake, or a flood or a tornado, it did not just happen. In defiance of all logic, she says that the continued listing of MEK has nothing to do with the mistreatment of the residents of Ashraf, or the treatment of MEK members inside Iran. Even though both the Iraqis and the Iranians do not hesitate to their proxies like a national Iranian American Council, NIAC, to cite the listing of MEK as a basis that justifies mistreatment of MEK members.
She suggests moving MEK members to “less contentious locations in Iraq”. Well there is nothing contentious about the location of Ashraf.
Of course it is near the Iranian border, but the residents of Ashraf were not attacked by Iranians, they were attacked by Iraqis. It does not make sense to move them deeper into Iraq. What this ingenuous nonsense. The last prescription shows that even this feeble letter has been bypassed by events.
Ambassador Butler, the author of this ridiculous suggestion has been replaced. Where valuable time has been lost. The time has long since passed for our government issue a clear public statement to the Malaki government that has to stop any plan to close Ashraf before the residents have been resettled.
The Department shares our concern? Perhaps the Secretary would like to visit the graves of those who were killed at Ashraf and tell them how sorry she is.
Of course she couldn’t do that because the Iraqis have occupied the part of Ashraf with the cemetery sits and Nurya Malaki has already said he will not allow any Americans to visit Ashraf. So what can the Secretary do as Ahmadinejad comes to New York and stages his annual obscene performance at the UN. She can do with the European Union has already done, what the UK has already done, remove this evil designation and do it as a splendid welcome to Ahmadinejad as he comes to New York to spit into the collective face of humanity.
This is a great opportunity to change the dynamic that has prevailed until now and to do it dramatically.
Delisting MEK would have two immediate and positive effects. First, it will show the current regime that we mean business and that we are prepared to take all necessary steps to bring pressure on a regime, including by removing a designation that simply enables that regime to continue abusing MEK members and claiming that even the US thinks they deserve it.
Changing the designation would take the regimes own focus off interfering with the Arab Spring as it has been through hezbollah and other surrogates and away also from other areas of the Middle East.
We, the USA have to stop just being a great power and start acting and behaving like a great power and show that the words of Abraham Lincoln, who described the US as the last best hope of earth and I think those words are true. Are in fact even truer today than when he first spoke them.
Thank you very much.
