NCRI – On Saturday December 10, on the International Human Rights Day, and on the eve of U.S. President Barack Obama’s meeting with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Washington DC, in a call to President Obama, American and European dignitaries urged annulment of the December 31 deadline on Ashraf and the forcible relocation of its residents inside Iraq, warning of an impending massacre and human catastrophe in Ashraf.
Speakers to the meeting were: Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance; André Glucksmann, author and a member of New France Philosophers; Andrew Card, President Bush Chief of Staff (2001-2006); Bill Richardson, New Mexico Governor (2003-2011) and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Mitchell Reiss, U.S. State Department Head of Strategy Development (2003 – 2005); Alan Dershowitz, one of the most prominent advocates of individual rights and the most well-known criminal lawyer in the world; Geoffrey Robertson QC, prominent British jurist and former appeal judge at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone; Sid Ahmed Ghozali, former Prime Minister of Algeria; Patrick Kennedy, U.S. Congressman (1995-2011); Senator Ingrid Betancourt, Columbian presidential candidate; General David Phillips, U.S. Military Police Commander (2008-2011); Jean-François Le Garrett, Mayor of Paris 1st District; Aude de Thuin, the founder of Women’s Forum for Economics; Cynthia Fleury, West contemporary philosopher.
Below is speech by Hon. Patrick Kennedy:
Thank you all very, very much. Very kind, thank you. Thank you. I’m honored to be here today and to join all of you and to join your leader Madame Rajavi. About a month and a half ago, I lost my sister, Cara, suddenly. It was not a death that any one of us expected. And one of the first letters that I received of condolence was from Madame Rajavi, and I thank her for that from the bottom of my heart.
I today still have trouble making sense of the fact that she was 51 years old and she was taken as a young mother of two teenagers. I shudder at the thought that many of you have sisters in Camp Ashraf who could die in 21 days and you have to make sense of that. I am here today to tell you that you’re not the only ones who will have to make sense of that. That will be on the conscience of every human being in the world that cares about human rights, because their lives are not lives simply of people trapped as refugees in a camp. Their lives represent the lives of every freedom loving, human rights respecting people in the world who would no more want that to happen to their family members as much as you want it to happen to your family member and that is why we must do something to stop it before it happens.
So I could talk today about how Iran is defying the world community and trying to construct a nuclear bomb to threaten the rest of the world. I could talk about how Iran has been the single largest force for terrorism in the world, whether exporting terrorism through Hezbollah or working to export independent explosive devices that are blowing up American soldiers throughout this war. I could talk about how they threatened to assassinate a world leader on American soil and kill Americans. I could go over the history as has just been gone over about how Iran has been a pattern of abuse internationally. But that’s not why I’m here today. I’m here today because Madame Rajavi said the first priority for all of us is to keep it very simple. We have 3400 lives on the line and our first responsibility as others have said is not to argue politics, because this isn’t a political argument. This is a human rights case. It’s about innocent people whose lives are being threatened unless we do something about it. So I just want to call on my president, President Obama, as others have called on before, to use the opportunity this Monday, two days from now, in Washington, D. C., to make it very clear to Nouri al-Maliki that this is not just an Iraq issue. This is not an Iran issue. This is a human rights issue and America intends to stand on the side of human rights and not let this massacre take place.
And I wanna say to all those Department of State advisors of the president, who are preparing him for his meeting with Nouri al-Maliki, that first and foremost, there is another phrase that has been left out of today’s discussion but is pertinent, and that is, “History is doomed to repeat itself if you fail to learn from it.” And we have. State department, we have state department. Secretary Gates met with Nouri al-Maliki on July, just before the 27th, 8th, and 9th attacks and was assured by the Iraqi government that they would not do anything and then they did. April 7th, Secretary Gates once again met Nouri al-Maliki, assured that nothing would happen and the next day he ordered troops in to assault Camp Ashraf. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. This is on the conscience of the United States, not to let Nouri al-Maliki lie to us once again as he’s done twice before, when he met with Secretary Gates the first time on July 2009 and when he met with Secretary Gates the second time on April 7th. Do no let this happen again, Mr. President, because if Nouri al-Maliki meets with you on the 12th and three weeks later he commits one of the greatest violations of human rights and crimes against humanity by assaulting and murdering the 3400 unarmed refugees of Camp Ashraf, that will be too much for our country to have to explain that we did not know that it was gonna happen. We have told it’s gonna happen. We’ve seen it happen twice before. Let us not use the excuse that we did not know this was gonna happen. Fifty years ago in a place in Europe that stood for freedom, my uncle, President Kennedy, made the immortal speech where he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” meaning it was every single person of the world who cared about freedom, who at that moment in world history stood with the people of Berlin. I have said it here before and I will say it again. The saying for our time right now is, “Man Irani hastam.”
The test, the test for all free peoples, whether they’re from the United States or from France or from Germany or wherever, the test for all people will be Man Ashrafi hastam. Thank you very much.
