Self-Sacrifice

by Struan Stevenson

  With these two thugs leading the charge, around 50 MPs who had won seats in the March elections were accused of being Baathists and denied the right to take up their seats in parliament. Most of these MPs were from the secularist, anti-Iranian ranks. But not content with the expulsion of its opponents, the pro-Iranian faction now exerted pressure on Iraq’s judges to insist on a manual recount of the four million votes cast in Baghdad. The process started amid great acrimony on Monday 3 May, with many complaining that political pressure had been brought to bear on the judges in a direct breach of the Iraqi constitution, which guarantees non-interference in judicial affairs. The exhaustive recount changed nothing, ending with exactly the same result.

  The newly elected Iraqi parliament met for the first time, under tight security, on 14 June. Under the Iraqi Constitution, a President must be elected within 30 days following the first sitting of the parliament. This deadline was due to expire on Tuesday 13 July, marking a crucial cut-off date for the Iraqi people. If the Constitution was breached, it meant all of the suffering, death, devastation and economic collapse resulting from the toppling of Saddam and the subsequent insurgency would have been in vain. Democracy was the only reason the beleaguered Iraqi people had endured all of this misery. If democracy was allowed to die with the breaching of the Constitution, then civil war and a return to violence and mayhem could be the only possible outcome. The international community had a duty to ensure that this was not allowed to happen. They had to defend the fragile constitution. If no President had been elected by 13 July then this should have automatically triggered the international community’s invoking of Article VII of the UN Charter, whereby the UN and the international community would assume responsibility to prevent a return to violence and civil war. This was of crucial importance, as any vacuum created by a breach of the Constitution would quickly be filled by neighbouring Iran, already meddling extensively in Iraqi internal affairs and keen to extend its malign brand of fascist Islam across the whole of the region, so that it would become the dominant power.

  Vice President Joe Biden visited Iraq on US Independence Day, the fourth of July, to re-affirm his commitment to a complete military withdrawal by the end of 2011, with 50,000 US military personnel leaving by August 2010. But during his visit, Biden didn’t seem to be concerned about who formed the next government in Iraq. He seemed determined to shake the dust of Iraq from his shoes and to wash his hands of the whole mess the US was about to leave behind.

  With escalating violence, almost daily suicide bombings and even the re-emergence of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army on the streets of Baghdad, the signs were ominous. The sectarian divisions, which the election was supposed to have healed, had re-opened. The faith of the Iraqi people in the democratic process was being sorely tested. Iraq needed a stable, non-sectarian government of national unity. The task of setting up such a government should have fallen to the victor of the election, Ayad Allawi. But the meddling of the Iranian regime had rendered such a result unlikely. For Tehran, victory for the secular and anti-Iranian regime, Allawi was a red line. They had to have someone they could control, and that meant Maliki had to be somehow shoehorned back into the Prime Minister’s office.

  In an article by Ali Khedery which appeared in the New York Times in August 2014, the writer, who was the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, acting as a special assistant to five US ambassadors and as a senior adviser to three heads of US Central Command, wrote that:

  After spending more than $1 trillion and losing some 4,500 soldiers’ lives, American politicians cannot dare reveal a dirty little secret: Iraq has since 2003 devolved into a combination of Lebanon and Nigeria — a toxic brew of sectarian politics and oil-fuelled kleptocracy. The combination of religious rivalry and endemic corruption has hollowed out the Iraqi Government, as evidenced by the country’s ongoing electricity crisis and the collapse of entire Iraqi Army divisions in the face of an advance by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, into Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, even though the Iraqi troops vastly outnumbered the militants.

  Later in the article he said:

  Increasing Iranian influence has only made matters worse. America sat back and watched in 2010 as Mr Maliki’s cabinet was formed by Iranian generals in Tehran, thereby assuring its strategic defeat in Iraq. ISIS is a direct outgrowth of that defeat. Sensing an American vacuum, both Mr Maliki and his Iranian patrons sought to consolidate their gains by economically, politically and physically crushing their Sunni and Kurdish rivals. Consequently, today’s ‘Iraqi security forces’ are almost exclusively Shiite, reinforced by militias financed, trained, armed and directed by Iran. Given Mr Maliki’s blatant sectarianism and his complicity in Bashar al-Assad’s campaign of genocide against Syria’s Sunnis, Sunni radicalization and the spread of ISIS across the region were predictable.1

  The same author in a long biographical article about Maliki in the Washington Post in July 2014 stated:

  In short, Maliki’s one-man, one-Dawa-party Iraq looks a lot like Hussein’s one-man, one-Baath Party Iraq. But at least Hussein helped contain a strategic American enemy: Iran. And Washington didn’t spend $1 trillion propping him up. There is not much ‘democracy’ left if one man and one party with close links to Iran control the judiciary, police, army, intelligence services, oil revenue, treasury and the central bank. Under these circumstances, renewed ethno-sectarian civil war in Iraq was not a possibility. It was a certainty. 2

  Back in 2010, news soon emerged that the two major Shiite blocs – the State-of-Law coalition headed by Maliki and the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) backed by Iran – had done a deal which placed them only a few seats short of forming a new government. INA included Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress Party and the fiercely sectarian Shiite Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Now Tehran’s attention turned to Ammar al-Hakim, a junior Shiia cleric who was the leader of one of Iraq’s most influential Shiia groupings, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). The ISCI commanded the loyalty of the most powerful Shiia militia in Iraq – the Badr Organisation (formerly known as the Badr Brigade). Hakim was ordered by the Mullahs to throw his support behind Maliki.

  Only the large Kurdish bloc remained to be persuaded to join Maliki’s coalition, with tempting offers of being awarded the Presidency of Iraq as well as the role of Speaker in the Council of Representatives and ministerial office in the key role of Foreign Minister. The Kurds rapidly agreed. At last, months after the election, Maliki had his paper-thin majority, but it was enough for him to form a government. By 13 July, Jalal Talabani, the prominent Kurdish leader, was appointed as Iraq’s President for a second term, meeting the constitutional deadline, but there was still no agreement on the distribution of key cabinet posts.

  To break the deadlock, as there was still no cabinet in place eight months after the elections, the President of Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, called for the creation of a national congress to resolve the differences and form a government. The national congress met in Erbil and was attended by the leaders of all the main political blocs including Ayad Allawi and Nouri al-Maliki. A nine article agreement was eventually adopted, which enabled Maliki to retain the post of Prime Minister, but promised the distribution of key cabinet posts covering defence, interior and security to Ayad Alawi’s al-Iraqiya bloc and other political factions. Allawi was also supposed to chair the National Strategic Council to overview the decisions. The ‘Erbil Agreement’ was signed in the presence of US Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, although this binding agreement was then studiously ignored by Maliki, who retained a vice-like grip on all of the key defence, interior and security portfolios in his own Prime Minister’s office, giving him almost dictatorial powers. Indeed, such was his abuse of the Erbil Agreement and his ruthless abuse of power that several prominent Iraqi politicians subsequently described him to me as being ‘worse than Saddam’.

  While this controversy raged in Iraq, with the Iranian Mullahs pulling the strings to secure a second term for the
ir man Nouri al-Maliki, the controversial Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki paid a visit to the European Parliament in Brussels on 1 June 2010. Mottaki had been expelled from Turkey when he had been Iran’s Ambassador, following the discovery of a prisoner trussed and gagged in the trunk of an Iranian Embassy car trying to cross the border from Turkey into Iran. Alert Turkish border guards heard thumping in the car trunk and demanded it should be opened. When the prisoner was released, he said he was one of several PMOI dissidents who had been kidnapped off the streets of towns and cities in Turkey, then held in a dungeon beneath the Iranian Embassy in Ankara, where people were severely tortured before being sent back to Iran for execution.

  I was outraged that this murderer had been invited to address a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee, so I organised a little welcoming party for him. When he arrived outside the committee room at 3 pm on 1 June, I was standing with a group of MEPs holding placards showing photos of Neda Agha Soltan, a student killed in 2009 during demonstrations against the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election. Mottaki had a large entourage of henchmen and bodyguards and was being pursued by a huge phalanx of camera crews and photographers. He momentarily paused when he saw our placards and I stepped forward and shouted in his face: ‘You are a murderer and you are not welcome in the European Parliament.’ Other MEPs joined in the shouts and catcalls, and his bodyguards immediately started to scuffle with us, trying to man-handle us out of the way, shouting ‘Don’t touch’ to anyone who got too close to their boss. I yelled, ‘Get your hands off me! Do not dare to lay your hands on an elected Member of this House. This is not Iran. We do not tolerate thugs here.’ All of this was caught on film, much to the embarrassment of Mottaki.

  As a postscript to this story, later that week, I got into one of the lifts in the European Parliament, heading to my office on the twelfth floor. The only other person in the lift was the First Secretary from the Iranian Embassy in Brussels. ‘You were a bit hard on my Foreign Minister the other day,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Calling him a murderer,’ he replied.

  ‘But he is a murderer,’ I said, and we rode on up in stony silence!

  1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/opinion/sunday/iraqs-last-chance.xhtml

  2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-stuck-with-maliki--and-lost-iraq/2014/07/03/0dd6a8a4-f7ec-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.xhtml

  20

  Interviews with PMOI Refugees Camp Liberty, August 2014

  Akbar Saremi Speaks about His Father Ali Saremi

  Akbar Saremi

  ‘My name is Akbar Saremi. I am the son of one of the longest-serving political prisoners in Iran. My father was executed in January 2010 for being a supporter of the PMOI and for visiting me in Camp Ashraf. Thousands more like him have been and are arrested, tortured and executed in Iran for supporting the PMOI. My Dad spent a total of 24 years of his life in prison. He was imprisoned for a year under the Shah but was set free when protestors liberated them during the revolution. Under the Mullahs’ regime he was imprisoned for a total of 23 years.

  Under the Mullahs’ regime he was arrested four different times. In 1981, he was arrested and imprisoned for six years for being a PMOI supporter and reading their newspaper. A year after my father’s release from prison I decided to join the PMOI in their struggle against the regime. I had seen and felt the crimes of this regime, especially against my own family. When the regime realised I had gone to Ashraf and joined the resistance, they arrested and severely tortured my father in such a brutal way that he developed major back problems, forcing him to use a wheelchair to get around. My mother used to say that he was unable to stand on his feet or walk, and they would not allow him to leave prison for treatment. He spent years in prison in that condition before being released.

  After the US invasion of Iraq, my parents came to see me in Ashraf. During the week that they stayed I gave them a tour of the camp and they met all my friends and took part in different events. Even before visiting Ashraf and while in prison, my father had remained a PMOI supporter. He was one of the prisoners who had resisted attempts by henchmen to break his morale. But even so, after seeing Ashraf and talking to many of the residents he had become a different person. He told me, “I am not the same person as I was before coming here; I will never forget Ashraf.” He used to say, “I will do whatever I can to spread the message of Ashraf wherever I go.” He added that the PMOI are unique in Iranian history and their sacrifice for the Iranian people is unmatched. My father was not an average man and never supported something unless he really believed in it. He was fluent in five languages – English, German, French, Arabic and Farsi. He was a writer and a poet who spent most of his life reading books and newspapers from all around the world. He was also the editor in chief of the Iranian newspaper Arian Homeland, which was banned after two years of publication for printing anti-regime articles.

  When my father came to visit me in Ashraf he used to ask me, “Are you Akbar?” I asked him, “Why are you asking me that?” He said, “I kept hearing different stories about you while I was in prison.” He went on to say that the first time he was in prison they had told him he had a visitor who had information about his son (me). When my father met with the visitor, he told my father that I had left the PMOI and was in a camp in Iraq and needed money. My father said “I was not sure if he was telling me the truth or not,” but because he did not want to show any weakness in front of his jailers he told the visitor, “I don’t care what he does, it does not concern me; he has chosen his own path.” My father said the story occupied his mind for months and disturbed him, and he thought to himself, what if it was true.

  The henchmen tried to break his resistance, using every dirty trick at their disposal. He said the second time he heard about me was after the US invasion of Iraq. He had been ordered to go to prison to report on my whereabouts, when they told him that I had been killed in the attacks by US forces. He said, “After hearing this news I decided to go to Ashraf and find out for myself. This is why I am in shock, when I find you alive in Ashraf.”

  Upon returning from Ashraf my father was arrested for addressing a gathering in Khavaran cemetery (the site of mass graves of political prisoners massacred in 1988). After his arrest, the regime realized that he had gone to Ashraf to visit me, and because of that they put more pressure on him to repent or he would be executed. He never gave in to their demands, and was executed just because he had gone to Ashraf to visit his son.

  My father had been to Ashraf and had seen the high spirits of the resistance and he had taken that same spirit with him to prison and thus became a symbol of resistance in prison. He spread the same spirit to the rest of the prisoners. He kept sending messages and letters from prison exposing the regime’s crimes at every occasion. During imprisonment he had written 25 different messages and letters to newspapers condemning the regime’s crimes. His activities provoked more pressure and torture, which caused a heart attack, leaving him paralyzed down his left side and wheelchair-ridden. When they took him to the gallows, he was on a wheelchair. My mother told me that when my father was out of prison and working in our shoe store, he had printed pictures of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi and placed them under his counter. Whenever he sold a shoe he used to slide one of those pictures in the box for the customers, telling them he had put a present in the box for them. My Mum said, “I kept telling him this is dangerous but he never listened and kept saying, we have to put out the word for Ashraf and the PMOI.”

  After they executed my father they did not return his body to us and secretly buried him in one of the villages near his home town. My Dad was a well-known man, and when the villagers realized they were burying him they informed my family. The regime’s Revolutionary Guards had told my family they were not allowed to hold a ceremony for him, but my family did not pay attention to the warning and held a large memorial service. The Guards attacked the memorial service and arrested my moth
er, and gave her a 10-year prison sentence. My mother was able to escape from Iran, leaving the regime empty-handed. She is now in Paris.

  The memory of my father and all the other martyrs will live on forever and their struggle will continue.’

  21

  The Second Ashraf Massacre

  On the morning of Thursday, 7 April 2011, I received a call in my office in Brussels from Tahar Boumedra. He had some deeply disturbing news. He told me that several battalions of the Iraqi army had taken up positions around Camp Ashraf, and that dozens of armoured personnel carriers, Humvees, bulldozers and other engineering vehicles had been strategically positioned around the camp’s perimeter fence. Boumedra said that he was getting calls every half hour from the residents of Ashraf to update him on the escalating crisis. He said he was certain that another attack was imminent, and that he had spoken to a high-ranking army officer who of course had denied everything and assured him that nothing was going to happen.

  At 4.45 a.m. the following morning, 8 April, the attack commenced. I began to receive a series of phone calls and emails as the attack progressed and the death toll of Ashrafis mounted. By 9 a.m. there were already 22 dead and hundreds seriously injured; three battalions of the Iraqi military had mounted the assault and they had now seized over one-third of the camp’s territory. I was making frantic phone calls to Ban Ki-moon in New York, António Guterres at UNHCR in Geneva and Baroness Ashton in Brussels. I left messages informing them of this latest brutal assault on unarmed and defenceless ‘people of concern’ to the UN, urging them to contact Maliki immediately to demand a halt to the slaughter.