According to Tahar Boumedra, when Kobler finally arrived in Baghdad in October, he took everyone at UNAMI by surprise. From the outset, he stated that it was his single priority to get the 3,400 residents of Ashraf moved to another location in total submission to Maliki’s orders. He then began a series of bizarre manoeuvres to achieve this goal, alienating his senior staff, four of whom subsequently resigned, including Tahar Boumedra. Soon we heard that Kobler’s wife had been appointed as German ambassador to Iraq, and she also had taken up residence in Baghdad. It seemed as if the Koblers were creating a cosy little sinecure, which required total commitment to and support for Maliki.
Meanwhile, Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, in seeking to promote a peaceful resolution to the Ashraf crisis, had appointed in September 2011 a special envoy for Ashraf, Jean de Ruyt, a Belgian senior diplomat and former ambassador to Poland and the UN in New York. At around the same time, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) declared that the Ashraf residents were to be considered formally as asylum-seekers, and urged Iraq to postpone any closure of the camp. Amnesty International reiterated this call on 1 November. It seemed that we were beginning to make real progress.
In Iraq, Kobler was hard at work. Such was his dedication to the Ashraf task that towards the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, he met five times with the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Danaifar, a well-known Qods Force commander, to discuss Ashraf. Following these meetings, Kobler drew up plans for the eviction of the 3,400 residents from Ashraf.
In various meetings with me and other MEP colleagues, Kobler claimed that at least half of the residents would willingly return to Iran after their transfer to Liberty, if they were given the chance to do so. He had said the same thing to the Iranian ambassador.1 He argued that Ashraf was under the total control of the PMOI, and so the residents did not have freedom of movement and were unable to leave the organisation. His assumption was that if they were relocated to Camp Liberty, many of them would take the opportunity voluntarily to return to Iran.
He was also keen to advocate the removal of sick people from Ashraf and their relocation to the Hotel Mohajer and the Hotel Yamamah in Baghdad, where, he argued, they could be better cared for. Dan Fried, Special Advisor on Camp Ashraf to the US Secretary of State, also strongly recommended that even disabled residents should move from Camp Liberty to one of these hotels.
It is certain that following his many meetings with the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Kobler knew the Hotel Mohajer and the Hotel Yamamah had been taken over by the sinister Iranian Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) and were effectively the equivalent of their ‘Gestapo headquarters’ in Baghdad. Moving any PMOI patients or disabled people to these hotels would be tantamount to signing their death warrants, and yet this was the proposition being actively pursued by Kobler and Fried.
Kobler had decided that the key to moving everyone out of Ashraf was to draw up a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between UNAMI, the Iraqi government and the PMOI. By November 2011 he had been working on the draft text for more than a month, but each time he submitted something to the Iraqi authorities they rejected it, complaining that the Ashraf residents had no legal status in Iraq and should therefore not be recognised as such in the MOU. Iraq was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention on Refugees and refused to recognise the status of the Ashrafis as refugees or asylum seekers. The Iraqis insisted that this ruled out moving the Ashrafis to a refugee camp, where they would have had freedom of movement. Instead, they insisted that Camp Liberty should be designated as a temporary transit location or TTL, where the 3,400 residents would be temporarily accommodated pending their removal to third countries. The Iraqis made it clear that Camp Liberty was to be a detention centre.
Instead of fiercely resisting this tragic breach of human rights, Kobler bent over backwards to reach a compromise with the Iraqi government. ‘Time is of the essence. Human rights are not important. We have to save lives,’ was his mantra to the UNAMI staff in Baghdad, according to Tahar Boumedra. By the end of November, over 20 versions of the MOU had been drawn up and rejected by one side or the other. Finally, in frustration at the delays, Kobler decided that he would unilaterally sign an MOU agreed only between him and the Iraqi government, even although it had been rejected by the PMOI. Kobler spoke in the UN Security Council session in New York about Iraq on 6 December 2011. On his return, representatives of the PMOI met him in the European Commission in Brussels with Jean De Ruyt on 7 December and told him that the residents were not prepared to move to another location inside Iraq unless the UN was prepared to deploy Blue Helmets to guarantee their safety.
To aid this process, I had proposed a plan on 5 December and sent a copy to Kobler and Mohammad Mohaddessin. My intention was to submit this plan before their meeting and to get the agreement of the PMOI and the Ashraf residents for it.
In the plan I wrote:
This agreement and each of its items should be taken in its totality as a package signed and guaranteed by the UN, US, EU, GOI and the Ashraf representatives concerning the closure of Camp Ashraf and the relocation of all its residents, with no exception, to Camp Liberty, as the temporary resettlement camp, under the guaranteed protection of the UN and with the UN flag flying over the camp, until such time as the last person leaves Camp Liberty and Iraq for re-settlement in a third country or any other place he/she wishes to go.
Protection of the camp will be provided by UN Blue Helmets or a combination of Blue Helmets and American private security companies. The protection will be guaranteed by the UN, US, and EU, and will be monitored by UNAMI permanently. The Ashraf residents are prepared to pay the expenses for employing private security companies.
By mentioning the use of private security companies, I was trying to minimise the Blue Helmets issue, which I knew was opposed by Kobler. The PMOI agreed to my plan and tabled it at their meeting with Kobler on 7 December. But Kobler refused to talk about anything other than the unconditional evacuation of Ashraf. He seemed to have a single objective, the closure of Ashraf. But nevertheless, he promised the PMOI representatives that he would not sign any agreement with the Iraqi government without their consent.
Several days later, Kobler, who had returned to Baghdad, called Mohaddessin and requested a meeting with Mrs Rajavi. He travelled from Iraq to Paris in mid-December and spent ten hours in discussions with her, during which he made many false promises in a bid to convince her to agree to the move to Camp Liberty.
In Paris Kobler promised Mrs Rajavi once again that he would not sign the Memorandum of Understanding with the Iraqi government without the agreement of the PMOI. But on the evening of 25 December 2011, he signed the MOU with Faleh al-Fayadh and then called Mohaddessin on the phone at midnight, claiming he had been forced to sign it! The news agencies in Iraq had already reported it. Kobler said that he would leave Baghdad early the next morning to fly to Paris to meet Mrs Rajavi on the afternoon of 26 December. When Mohaddessin asked for the text of the MOU to be emailed to him, Kobler said that this was not possible because New York had to see it first!
The MOU signed by Kobler amounted to an agreement forcibly to evict the residents of Ashraf and to imprison them in the Camp Liberty detention centre. It was an abject betrayal of the 3,400 Ashrafis. In complete breach of all international conventions, the MOU specifically denied access to Camp Liberty for NGOs, parliamentarians and diplomats, and clearly determined the status of the refugees from Camp Ashraf as detainees, despite the fact that none had ever been charged, far less tried, for any offence. The 3,400 defenceless men and women were about to be forcibly evicted from their 36 kilometre-square home of almost three decades and sent to a prison compound measuring only half a kilometre square. Kobler argued that having the residents incarcerated in a detention centre was better than seeing them all killed, effectively denying the Ashrafis their basic fundamental rights at a stroke and even denying them the right to life, as the choice they were now being confronted with was to move to Camp Liberty
or die.
When news of the MOU was delivered to the residents of Camp Ashraf, they were outraged, accusing Kobler of acting on behalf of Maliki rather than on behalf of the UN. ‘How can the UN justify entrusting the victims to their murderers?’ they asked. When Kobler signed the MOU on 25 December, he had falsely said that Camp Liberty was in a state of readiness. The Ashraf representatives had asked him many times if they could accompany him to check the camp. They had even proposed to send a group of 100 people first to prepare the place for the rest. But Kobler rejected such demands and insisted on the residents’ immediate transfer to Liberty.
When Kobler came to my office in the European Parliament he was accompanied by Clare Bourgeois from UNHCR and Hillary Clinton’s special envoy on Ashraf, Dan Fried, a gnarled little man with a disconcerting twitch and a foul temper, who until now had been working on resettling prisoners from Guantánamo Bay. I had asked Alejo Vidal-Quadras, Vice President of the European Parliament, to join our meeting. Kobler insisted that his mission in seeking to relocate the Ashraf residents to Camp Liberty was entirely humanitarian and designed to save lives.
He had brought with him a large volume of photographs of Camp Liberty which he proceeded to use to explain how the facility, although small, was well-equipped with good quality trailers for sleeping accommodation, as well as communal dining halls, kitchens, showers and toilets. He said the camp only required some minor repairs, which the Iraqi government had promised to carry out. Dan Fried and Clare Bourgeois urged us to intercede with Mrs Rajavi and plead with her to persuade the Ashrafis to move to Camp Liberty to prevent further bloodshed. The large-scale photos that Kobler displayed were certainly impressive. Alejo said the camp looked better than anything he had experienced as a young conscript in the Spanish army. I said the accommodation looked better than the boarding school I had been sent to in Scotland as a boy. We both agreed that we would pass on our views to Mrs Rajavi in Paris and urge her to persuade the residents of Ashraf to move to Camp Liberty. Little did we know how comprehensively Kobler had fooled us; only later, after Tahar Boumedra had resigned from UNAMI in anger and frustration at Kobler’s naked betrayal of the core values of the UN, did we learn the truth.
Boumedra recounted how Kobler had ordered a large team of UNAMI staff in Baghdad to take the best photos possible of the facilities at Camp Liberty, avoiding anything dirty or dilapidated. He then ordered the whole UNAMI team to Photoshop the pictures repeatedly until he was satisfied that they provided a well-doctored and positive impression. All signs of swampy ground, broken sewerage pipes, cracked panes of glass and rusting metals, were carefully painted out. The final volume of photos was a masterwork of dishonesty, designed to fool elected parliamentarians and win approval for the MOU. It was a disgraceful deception.
The aim of Kobler’s trip to Brussels was to deceive friends of Ashraf in the European Parliament and to convince EU officials who, under our pressure, were following the issue of Ashraf. Kobler and Dan Fried wanted to show that Liberty had acceptable living conditions. An internal report prepared by one of Kobler’s officials who had attended his Brussels meeting revealed how he wanted to damage the PMOI and Liberty residents and to force the European Parliament to exert pressure on them. A part of this report, which was sent to me in error, regarding a meeting on 2 February 2012 with Elmar Brok, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee stated:
The US representative reported the 2 messages that he had carried from Clinton:
It is important that Rajavi starts to hear other voices from parliamentarians than only those ones who support her and Ashraf. Hearing only from one side (parliament & senior officials) gives her some hope to rally more voices with the objective that Kobler and US will move away therefore Ashraf can stay forever.
Importance that those individuals granted refugees status by UNHCR are moved out of TTL ASAP. While US have not taken any decision, discussions are on-going to consider those who have been recognised as refugees, together with those with family links or those who had former residence in the US.
Elmar Brok agreed at the end of the meeting to issue a press release the same day and invite SRSG (Kobler) to the next Committee meeting (later in Feb or March).
Although Kobler was telling us on 2 February how good Liberty was, the UNHCR shelter expert Martin Zirn had written on 19 January that Liberty was far from meeting humanitarian and human rights standards and its infrastructures were so deficient that they could not be quickly completed and repaired. Kobler, however, had not shown us this official report, and when the PMOI revealed it a year later, he failed to explain why he had insisted that everything in Camp Liberty had been OK.
The reality was that Camp Liberty was in a dreadful condition, as Kobler well knew; it was entirely unfit for human habitation even for a small number of people. For 3,400 people it would be little less than a concentration camp. By consigning the Ashraf residents to detention with no interaction with the outside world, no visits from family, lawyers, parliamentarians or diplomats, Kobler had effectively betrayed the core principles of international humanitarian law. He had designated the Ashrafis as prisoners, despite the fact they had never been convicted of anything. This was a scandal on an international scale. At meetings involving large groups of PMOI supporters around the world, the chant of ‘Shame on you Kobler,’ could be regularly heard.
Despite the PMOI’s feeling of abject betrayal by Kobler over the final signing of the MOU on Christmas Day 2011, Paris now reluctantly agreed to persuade the 3,400 residents of Ashraf to prepare to move to Camp Liberty. They were encouraged in this by Kobler’s promise that they would be under 24/7 guaranteed protection by UNAMI, which was another lie. Kobler now informed the Iraqi government that he had reached agreement with all parties for the evacuation of Ashraf to begin, but it was quickly realised that the facilities at Camp Liberty were in such a poor condition that the first transport of residents had to be postponed until emergency repairs could be carried out.
As a goodwill gesture and to demonstrate the flexibility of the Ashraf residents in the face of extreme provocation, it was agreed that the first 400 Ashraf residents would move to Camp Liberty on 17 February 2012. They had not been permitted to visit the place they were about to move to, to assess what they would need to make it habitable; they were not allowed to take most of their personal belongings with them; and they were only allowed to take along 10 vehicles out of some 150 they owned. They were to have no freedom of movement and the surface area provided inside the camp was less than 1.5% of Ashraf’s total surface area, with a police station and a large number of police present inside this restricted zone. There were no tarred pathways and ramps for wheelchair users or the elderly, only rough gravel walkways. The old, rusting electricity generators were obsolete and half of them didn’t work.
When Kobler refused to allow a small group of the residents to go to Liberty to check and prepare the place in advance, I wrote a letter to him to make arrangements for me and some of my colleagues in the European Parliament, together with lawyers representing the Ashrafis, to travel to Baghdad and visit Liberty and then go to Ashraf to reassure the residents. But, as usual, Kobler did not reply.
I wrote a letter on 1 January 2012 to Jean de Ruyt, Martin Kobler and Dan Fried:
Now that they have accepted the condition of displacement inside Iraq and an initial 400 residents are ready to go to Camp Liberty with their belongings and vehicles, it is absolutely perverse for the Iraqi authorities to deny them the right to take these possessions with them or indeed to send an advance party of engineers to inspect Camp Liberty and ascertain their key requirements prior to moving there. Denial of these basic requests simply convinces the people of Ashraf that they are being humiliated and imprisoned, rather than moved to a temporary staging-post en route to re-settlement outside Iraq.
This letter, like so many others, was not answered, and so the first group of 400 Ashraf residents were taken to Camp Liberty on 17 February. On the day of the transfer, the sad
istic Iraqi Colonel Sadiq ensured the 400 refugees were subjected to every conceivable humiliation. They were held up for hours and exposed to repeated searches and ID checks. Many of their personal belongings were confiscated and looted by Sadiq and his men. The whole process was designed by Sadiq to be a sort of torture. In any case, clearly this transfer was unnecessary when the residents had already accepted the European Parliament’s plan for relocation to third countries. They had each individually applied for asylum to the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees in August 2011, and had the Iraqi government allowed the UNHCR refugee status interview procedure to begin at that time in Camp Ashraf, a significant number of them would by now have been relocated out of Iraq.
But when the first 400 Ashrafis finally arrived at Camp Liberty in February 2012 they were deeply shocked by what they found. Instead of the first-class facilities in this former US military base they had been shown in Kobler’s doctored photos, they found themselves in a shabby slum, with flimsy, dilapidated containers for living accommodation, broken-down sewage pipes, intermittent electricity and no running water. These 400 people, around half of them women, were now completely at the mercy of the Iraqi military, commanded by the notorious Colonel Sadiq, one of the alleged ringleaders of the two previous violent massacres. The refugees were humiliated and abused. Requests for vital medicines and basic mobility equipment for the disabled were refused. Attempts to have a main water supply connected at the refugees’ own expense were repeatedly blocked. Even basic sun-shelters to protect the residents from the blistering 55°C summer sun were rejected. 18,000 concrete T-walls that had protected the trailers in the US military base from mortar or rocket attack had been removed and the camp was now a sitting duck for such attacks. Requests for body armour and hard hats, which were stored at Ashraf and had been purchased in 2006 following an agreement between the residents and US forces as civilian defence equipment, were summarily refused.
Self-Sacrifice Page 17
