by Abbas Rezai
OfficialWire, Strasbourg, 28 Sept 2011 – A meeting organized by European Parliament’s Friends of a Free Iran intergroup (FOFI) in Strasbourg today brought together dozens of Members of European Parliament to address the on-going humanitarian tragedy at Camp Ashraf. FOFI, which was formed in 2004, consist of over 100 MEPs from different political groups.
Since the April 8th assault of Iraqi forces on Camp Ashraf, 60 miles north east of Baghdad, when 36 defenceless Iranian refugees were killed and hundreds were wounded by the Iraqi army, the situation has not improved. Some 3400 Iranian dissidents, members of the PMOI/MEK have been living in Camp Ashraf for the past two decades.
Restrictions imposed by Iraqi forces on access to medicines, fuel and other basic necessities have made living conditions increasingly difficult for the residents since US handed over the security of the camp to the Iraqi government at the end of 2008. Over 300 loudspeakers continue a round-a-clock psychological torture of the people in a bid to wear them out. On top of that, recently two new communication jamming stations have been stationed near the camp which could block news and footage from the camp to reach to the world if a new attack was to happen.
Chairing the meeting, Struan Stevenson (MEP), President of parliament’s Iraq Delegation expressed his outrage about the deadline the Iraqi government has imposed to close down the camp by the end of this year. “This is simply a deadline impossible to meet”, he stressed after explaining about a whole range of activities he had done in various European capitals during the summer to help securing the safety of Ashraf residents.
Parliament Vice-President Alejo Vidal-Quadras from Spain reiterated that a humanitarian tragedy was looming in the horizon if Iraq would not cooperate with international demands to remove the deadline. “A new move by the Iraqi army would definitely cost many more innocent lives,” he warned.
Earlier in the week, EU’s High Representative on foreign relations, Catherine Ashton, had appointed a special envoy to solve the Ashraf crises. “Ambassador De Ruyt is an experienced diplomat who was until now Belgium’s Permanent Representative to the European Union…He will work with the Member States, MEPs, the Government of Iraq, the United Nations, the United States and other partners to advise the High Representative on how to solve the situation in Camp Ashraf in line with humanitarian and human rights principles,” the High Representative’s statement read.
Jim Higgins, Parliament Quaestor from Ireland shared other speakers’ concern of a possible massacre at Ashraf and urged EU member states to take a quota each of the residents as refugees to save their lives.
Peter Stastny, a former NHL Ice Hockey champion and now MEP from Slovakia, suggested member states to take a group of Ashraf residents each as refugees before the end of December and do a humanitarian gesture as a “Christmas gift” to the residents. He compared it with his own experience when he had got asylum in Canada fleeing from the former communist regime of Czechoslovakia.
Other participants from both new and old EU member states and from different political groups backed European Parliament’s proposal for a peaceful resettlement of Ashraf residents to third countries. They called for restraint against violence and bloodshed and annulment of the deadline set for the end of 2011 to close down Ashraf. They urged the EU’s envoy to visit Ashraf.