Against this worsening background I remained deeply concerned that another bloody attack could take place at any time, leading to a Srebrenica-style annihilation of the unarmed refugees in the camp. It was clear that an urgent solution had to be found to the Ashraf crisis, but once again the international community seemed incapable of action. Ad Melkert and Tahar Boumedra called together a second meeting of the EU and US ambassadors in Baghdad, but were met with prejudicial statements and mutterings about terrorists and evil cults, based on propaganda circulated by the Iranian regime. The Mullahs were keen to propagate the rumour that many people were being held against their will in Camp Ashraf. They claimed that discipline was so rigorous that any dissenters were beaten and permission to leave the camp was routinely denied.
In fact, my close friends and MEP colleagues Alejo Vidal-Quadras and Paulo Casaca had both visited Ashraf (Paulo on several occasions), and had been deeply impressed by the residents. They were given complete freedom to interview anyone they wished, and prepared detailed reports on their visits when they returned to Brussels. Their reports rubbished the scare stories and smears being circulated by Tehran. Unfortunately, with the encouragement of the Iraqi authorities, these stories had gained some purchase amongst the diplomatic community in Baghdad and had even contaminated views amongst UNHCR and UNAMI staff.
18
Interviews with PMOI Refugees Camp Liberty, August 2014
The Medical Siege of Camp Ashraf
Hassan Habibi
‘My name is Hassan Habibi. I am 48 years old and I am an electrical engineer. I came to Camp Ashraf in 1983. In 2003 after signing the agreement with the Americans, the protection of Ashraf became the responsibility of the US forces. Despite our objections, in 2009 the US transferred the protection of Ashraf to the Iraqis. It was obvious to us that the Iraqi forces were under the influence of the Iranian regime and were planning to close Ashraf and return the residents to Iran where they would face torture and execution. The Iraqi government besieged us and imposed a medical siege on the camp.
Subsequently the Iranian regime’s agents, along with Iraqi forces, attacked the camp using armoured Humvees firing indiscriminately on the unarmed residents. On 28 July 2009, I was run over by one of these armoured Humvees, which left me severely wounded and unconscious. I suffered a broken pelvis fractured in four different places and a ruptured spleen. The ambulance that came for me was also riddled with bullets.
When I regained consciousness at Ashraf clinic I saw hundreds of wounded there. There was no room left and people were forced to lie on the floor. Even then the Iraqi forces would not allow anyone to leave the camp for treatment or allow Iraqi physicians to enter. After two days a group of American physicians who resided at the adjacent camp were allowed to visit us and they transferred eight of the critically wounded people, including myself, to Ballad hospital for treatment. Because of the delay in medical care, Alireza Ahmad Khah who was also wounded in his pelvis, passed away. He was lying beside me in a Humvee belonging to the American forces and he passed away as we were leaving Ashraf.
Another example was Siavoosh Nezamal Molki whose head was smashed by the Iraqis using a bat, causing a brain aneurism. He lost his life because of the delay in providing treatment. I was at the American forces’ hospital for a month and a half, but they did not perform the internal surgeries I needed. They told me that I had to wait till January 2010 and they returned me to the camp. The National Council of Resistance issued a statement saying that they were willing to pay the expenses for the operations and would even send skilled physicians to Iraq to perform the surgeries or have me transferred out of Iraq for the operation, but none of these proposals were accepted.
Finally, in February 2011 when a mission from Geneva came to visit the camp and had asked to visit some of the wounded and injured, I was one of the people whom they met. After that I was able to leave the camp and go to Erbil in northern Iraq for my much-needed surgery. But the doctors in Erbil told me that because of the prolonged delay there was nothing they could do for me. I was returned to the camp with a Foley catheter stuck to my bladder. The medical siege has left me with a shortened leg and limited mobility. I am unable to lift anything. I have to live with a Foley catheter in my stomach for the rest of my life.
This situation is still going on in Camp Liberty and the residents have to go through the same ordeal trying to see a doctor or a specialist. They are not allowed to see a private doctor or go to a private clinic even considering the situation in Iraq; the public health facilities have a very low standard of care and hygiene due to a high number of patients. I had lost sight in one of my eyes and my other eye had the same symptoms. When I was finally allowed to go to the hospital to get my eye examined, a few armed guards constantly followed us, treating us like prisoners. They even entered the visiting room with the doctor. Due to the high number of patients the doctors would only spend a few minutes to listen to each patient before giving them a prescription. It is obvious that with such circumstances if a person has a complicated illness that needs closer attention, they would not be able to take care of it. I had requested many times to be sent to a private clinic but I was refused every time.’
19
Iraqi Elections
Until early January 2010, the international community was fairly confident that the main obstacles to holding a good, free and fair election on 7 March that year had been overcome and that the Iraqi government was showing great maturity and leadership in laying the foundations for a peaceful and fully accountable poll. However, the escalating extent of Iranian interference in Iraq was rapidly becoming a matter for grave concern. There had been an attempt to ban over 500 mainly Sunni politicians from the election process, including prominent parliamentarians and political leaders like Dr Saleh al-Mutlak. There was no doubt this was being done at the request of Tehran and by Shiite political factions that had allegiance to Iran rather than Iraq. It was having a major de-stabilising impact on the election process. The escalating political crisis led to a surprise visit to Baghdad by US Vice President Joe Biden, in an attempt to resolve the potentially explosive issue.
The previous December, Iranian military personnel had crossed the border into Iraq and seized control of the Fakeh oil field, hauling down the Iraqi flag and raising the Iranian one. This caused huge resentment inside Iraq, and it was no coincidence that a visit by Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to Baghdad shortly afterwards was aimed at settling the Fakeh oil field dispute based on an Iranian strategy for controlling the Iraqi election process. The Mullahs in Tehran were past masters at hostage-taking, and their seizure of the Fakeh oilfield provided them with a useful bargaining counter. Ahmadinejad’s Foreign Minister Mottaki demanded the expulsion of the 500 anti-Iranian, secular politicians from the election process, and in particular Dr Saleh al-Mutlak, a senior parliamentarian who was a vociferous opponent of Iranian meddling in Iraq, in return for Iran’s withdrawal from the Fakeh oil field. This was classic Mullah-style diplomacy. The Iraqi government complied, banning the politicians on trumped up de-Baathification charges, alleging that they were supporters of the former dictator Saddam Hussein.
In fact, the one common factor uniting the 500 expelled, secular politicians was that they opposed Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs and some of them fiercely opposed the repressive measures against Ashraf. Indeed, Dr Saleh al-Mutlak, who led a sizeable parliamentary group, took part in a big gathering in Ashraf in June 2008. Then an amazing petition emerged, signed by three million Shiias in southern Iraq, in support of the Ashraf residents.
But the absence of key Sunnis from the electoral process was a calculated step aimed at handing victory once again to a Shiia-dominated, pro-Iranian government, paving the way for the constant acquiescence of Baghdad to the will of Tehran. But the Iranian regime didn’t stop here. There was also the brutal assassination of key political figures, such as Dr Soha Abdallah in Mosul, the illegal arrest of Najem Harbi, head of the al-Iraqiya slate in Diyal
a province, together with an extensive campaign of arrests of al-Iraqiya supporters in Salaheddin and south Baghdad. Two brothers and a sister of Tariq al-Hashemi, Vice-President of Iraq at the time, who vociferously opposed the torture and repression of political prisoners, were assassinated.
Having excluded some of the key opposition figures from the election, al-Maliki then abused his position as Prime Minister and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, to prepare a comprehensive strategy for defrauding the Iraqi people out of their democratic choice. Evidence emerged of candidates being attacked and beaten by the Iraqi security forces in Karbala, and leaflets were distributed threatening violence and death to supporters of some of the nationalist and non-sectarian parties. Massive amounts of, allegedly, Iranian cash was distributed to buy votes, and in one case apparently pistols were purchased and handed out to villagers in return for their pledges of support.
I was so appalled at the endless flow of emails and reports of fraud and corruption that were streaming into my office on a daily basis that I applied to the European Parliament’s secretariat to lead an election observer mission to Iraq. I was refused permission on security grounds. I therefore decided to set up an on-line election observation facility. I created a special website with a unique email address, and invited anyone with evidence of election fraud to send it to me, providing names of the guilty parties wherever possible. Through press conferences and press releases translated into Arabic, I spread the word throughout Iraq, and as the election drew closer I was inundated with emails. I received allegations from senior politicians, serving army officers, polling station officials, teachers, journalists and ordinary citizens, demonstrating that every aspect of the election was beset by squalid acts of fraud.
A senior member of al-Maliki’s administration, a serving army general, even travelled to Brussels in the days immediately leading up to the election, to tell me that he had been ordered to drop hundreds of thousands of leaflets from helicopters over the predominantly Sunni suburbs of Baghdad, warning the population that if they voted for the secular Ayad Allawi they would be killed; he was disgusted by this and was prepared to risk his life to bring me the information. He told me that Iraqi troops were ordered to fire mortar rounds into the same Sunni areas to prevent the people from leaving their homes on polling day to vote. Many lost their lives as a result.
I discovered that tens of thousands of ex-pat Iraqis were refused permission to cast their votes in Europe, on spurious grounds relating to an alleged lack of proper identification. Inside Iraq, on the day set aside for military personnel and prisoners to vote, widespread cheating was reported. Entire regiments were denied the right to vote because they were considered hostile to al-Maliki. Over 1,500 youths were rounded up on the streets and imprisoned in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, and told that they would only be released next day after they voted for al-Maliki.
Truckloads of boxes filled with voting papers pre-marked for al-Maliki were stopped at the Iranian border in failed attempts to smuggle them into Iraq. Polling station officials claimed they were ordered to stuff bundles of these pre-marked voting slips into their ballot boxes on polling day. At the end of polling, election observers were ordered to leave voting stations at gunpoint, the doors were locked and corrupt officials allegedly stuffed ballot boxes with pro-Maliki voting slips. They marked countless pro-Allawi voting slips with a second tick to render them invalid and altered figures on their final returns.
Having gathered extensive evidence of election fraud, I then sifted all of the emails to remove any trace of identities in order to protect the safety of the people who had risked their lives to contact me. Arabic emails were translated into English and as far as possible I tried to cite only evidence that had been corroborated by more than one independent source. But even with such rigorous editing, the volume of evidence still ran to 40 pages, which I published in book form and circulated widely throughout the European Parliament, the European Commission and to EU foreign ministers, diplomats and governments. The publication caused a volcanic eruption in Baghdad. Nouri al-Maliki himself called a press conference to denounce me as a liar and an enemy of Iraq. This drew even more attention to my document, which received widespread coverage across the Middle East, particularly in Iraq.
Despite all of these well-laid plans by al-Maliki and his Iranian allies, the repeated bomb blasts, death threats and intimidation failed to stop millions of courageous Iraqis from casting their votes for Ayad Allawi and his non-sectarian, nationalist party. I had met Dr Allawi in a long meeting in Brussels some months before. He initiated a very valuable alliance, the al-Iraqiya List, with the help of Dr Saleh al-Mutlak, Osama al-Nujaifi (the future Speaker of the Parliament) and Dr Tariq al-Hashemi (the future Vice President of Iraq), who were all totally opposed to the Iranian regime’s meddling in Iraq.
Tired of the years of violence and corruption and the creeping, evil influence of Iran, brave Iraqis went to the polls in droves to cast their votes against al-Maliki and his henchmen. Press reports later said that if I had not exposed the fraud in the early part of the election, there is no doubt that Maliki would have won by a landslide. But my intervention led to increased media scrutiny and caused the later stages of the great fraudulent scheme to falter. In fact Ayad Allawi should have won a decisive victory, but the early attempts at rigging and manipulation left his party neck and neck with Maliki.
The final result showed that Allawi had won the election by two seats. This caused consternation in Tehran, and Maliki was ordered by the Iranian Mullahs to demand a complete recount of every single vote. This would have necessitated the re-deployment of over 400,000 counting agents and would clearly have provided Maliki with another great opportunity to cheat and emerge victorious. But Maliki was determined to cling to power at all costs. He even issued threatening remarks about a return to violence if the votes were not recounted. With three divisions of the Iraqi army owing their entire allegiance to him, these were not regarded as idle threats.
Meanwhile the EU, the US and the UN continued to play the role of the three wise monkeys! They saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil. Alarmed that any allegations of a fraudulent election might sow the seeds of renewed violence that would thwart America’s plans for imminent troop withdrawal, they instead insisted that the election was largely fair. Like Pontius Pilate, they were desperate to wash their hands of the whole Iraqi affair and move on. The mess and misery they left in their wake seemed of minor importance. They sowed the wind and four years later they were reaping the whirlwind.
In the meantime, on a visit to Semipalatinsk in East Kazakhstan on 6 April 2010, I had been invited, in my role as Roving Ambassador for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), to join the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, on a visit to ‘Ground Zero’ to mark the 20th anniversary of the closure of the former Soviet Union’s biggest nuclear weapons testing site. We flew by helicopter from the airport at Semipalatinsk to Ground Zero where a tent had been erected and a press conference took place. Rather comically, in the middle of his address to the UN Secretary General, President Nazarbayev handed over a large, gnarled piece of melted glass, which, he explained, had once been solid rock but had been turned into glass by a nuclear explosion. Ban Ki-moon quickly handed the glass rock to one of his aides, who also quickly passed it to another aide and so it went on, like a game of ‘pass the parcel’. No one was keen to hold on to this potentially lethally radioactive piece of history!
After the press conference we flew back to the airport at Semipalatinsk and I was invited to join the Secretary General and the President for a light lunch before we all departed for meetings in neighbouring Turkmenistan. A light lunch in Kazakhstan always includes a boiled sheep’s head, and this was duly placed in front of Ban Ki-moon as the primary guest of honour. To my great surprise he knew exactly how to deal with the ceremonial slicing and serving of the grisly head, deftly cutting off an ear and offering it to P
resident Nazarbayev with a graceful little speech hoping that it would help the President to hear the views of his people.
After several toasts with vodka, I took the opportunity to broach the subject of Camp Ashraf with the Secretary General. I told him that I was deeply concerned that there would be more bloodshed at the camp and that it was imperative that UN blue-helmets should be permanently stationed there after the withdrawal of US forces, to ensure the safety of the 3,400 residents. I also reminded him of the need to encourage the US and EU Member States to open their doors to these people once they had been registered as refugees by the UNHCR, in order that we could get them out of Iraq to countries of safety. President Nazarbayev and the Kazakh Foreign Minister looked rather nonplussed at this conversation and after the Secretary General had promised me that he would look into the matter when he returned to New York they quickly changed the subject. As we parted later towards our respective jets, Ban Ki-moon said to me, ‘Anytime you are in New York, please come and see me in my office at the UN HQ.’
Back in Tehran, the Mullahs were rubbing their hands together in glee. Past-masters at manipulating elections in their own country, they were now looking forward to a new coalition government in Iraq which would include their Shiia acolyte Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand pro-Iranian cleric, whose Mahdi army killed scores of US and British troops and who now held the balance of power in the Iraqi parliament. The Sadrists had won 40 seats in the elections and were thus a powerful pro-Iranian bloc in bed with Ammar al-Hakim, head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq). With their help, al-Maliki could yet re-emerge as the puppet Prime Minister of Iraq.
The coalition negotiations took eight months to conclude. Maliki had clung to power like a limpet, determined to use every means to stay in office. There were legal challenges against a number of Ayad Allawi’s newly elected MPs, with attempts to have some disqualified on trumped-up charges alleging they were former supporters of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party. Maliki had set up the so-called Accountability and Justice Commission under the illegitimate leadership of the notorious Ahmed Chalabi, widely seen as the man who persuaded America to invade Iraq, and his partner-in-crime Ali al-Lami, the virulently pro-Iranian witchfinder-general who saw a member of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in every corner. He once absurdly even accused US General David Petraeus of being a Baathist, and said that if he had been Iraqi he would have been arrested!
Self-Sacrifice Page 10
