Self-Sacrifice (22 page)

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:

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:

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:

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 sadistic 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.