November 17, 2008
UNITED NATIONS: Iranian demonstrators ended a 65-day vigil outside U.N. headquarters Monday and headed to Washington to seek assurances the United States will continue protecting family and friends inside Iraq who oppose the Iranian government.
Across from the U.N., demonstrators held signs, chanted and made speeches until Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern about the Iranian dissidents living at Camp Ashraf, which the Americans may hand over to the Iraqis. Now, they are converging on a park across from the White House. “It’s now time to focus on the U.S.,” said Nasser Rashidi, head of a Virginia-based Iranian-American human rights group.
For more than two decades the camp has housed members of the Mujahedeen Khalq, also known as the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, thrown out of Iran in the 1980s. They became allied with Saddam Hussein’s regime, which helped fund the group’s attacks against the Iranian regime. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Americans disarmed several thousand of the group’s members and promised to protect them at Ashraf. The U.S. and European Union list it as a terrorist group.
“They cannot express their voice about anything,” said Moslem Filabi, a former wrestler on the Iranian national team. He said it was his duty to speak for others as a declared national hero, having represented Iran at three Olympics and won 17 medals at international competitions before leaving Iran in 1982, three years after the revolution. Last week, Ban told the Security Council, the U.N.’s most powerful body, that the U.N. political mission in Iraq is closely monitoring the camp. Its residents are protected by the U.S.-led multinational force, and since July 2004 the U.S. has recognized the camp’s residents as “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions.
But Iraq’s government wants to take “full control of the camp in the near future,” Ban said. Because of that, he said, the U.N. wrote Iraq to ensure it will “protect Ashraf residents from forcible deportation, expulsion or repatriation … and to refrain from any action that would endanger their life or security.” Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Hamid al-Bayati said Iraq’s government wants Camp Ashraf cleared out but won’t force the refugees to return to Iran. “We will allow those would like to go voluntarily back to Iran to go back, but we would like others to go to other countries,” al-Bayati said. “But we don’t want to keep Mujahedeen Khalq in Iraq.” Iran’s U.N. Mission has had no comment.
The vigil continues, in a different place, with some demonstrators leaving jobs or traveling long distances to take part. A few shed tears outside the U.N. while recounting the dangers facing their family and friends, and the personal losses among what they said were 120,000 political prisoners executed in Iran during the 1980s.
“I had a family, four brothers and sisters, and I lost two of them,” Maliheh Salehyar of Toronto recalled between sobs over her recollections of rape, torture and murder. “And the other members of the Camp Ashraf, I feel all of them like my brother and sister. I have no family here now.
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