News about the Humanitarian Crisis for Camp Ashraf Residents

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Suppressive act against Ashraf residents, a new criminal ploy by al-Maliki before elections
NCRI Press Release

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
NCRI - Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, described the preposterous and suppressive show by the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and dispatch of a number of its agents under the cover of families of Ashraf residents to Iraq and setting up the stage for media shows as new criminal acts by the Iraqi committee responsible for suppression of Ashraf residents under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s control to serve the religious fascism ruling Iran in the run-up to the Iraqi parliamentary elections.

Al-Maliki and his partners who have been functioning as a branch of the clerical regime’s Council of Guardians for the elections in Iraq by disqualifying candidates opposed to the domination of Ali Khamenei, mullahs’ Supreme Leader, and the terrorist Qods force over Iraq, are now facing Iraqi people’s outrage and hatred and international condemnation. In these circumstances, they are now trying to create a crisis to prepare the grounds for new suppressive measures on Ashraf at the behest of the Iranian regime. This is indeed what the regime needs in the midst of the nationwide uprising.

Mrs. Rajavi calls on the United Nations Secretary General, Security Council, Special Representative of the Secretary General for Iraq, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), the United States President, US Secretary of States, US Ambassador and the American forces in Iraq to take urgent measures to stop these criminal conspiracies and end unjust and unlawful siege on Ashraf. She also called for an end to a ban on visits to Ashraf by families of its residents, their lawyers, human rights activists and parliamentarians. The Iraqi Government and al-Maliki will be held accountable for any crisis and incident in Ashraf that is created by the agents of MOIS who are fully backed by the Iraqi forces according to documents and video clips available, she noted...  Read More

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Iran revolution needs support
Regime change can stop what a war can't
The Washington Times

February 10,  2010

By Brian Binley, a Conservative Party member of the British Parliament.
Iran's nuclear activities - this week ramped up with fresh plans to expand uranium enrichment - and its sponsorship of international terrorism pose an ever-growing threat that must be dealt with by the international community. A year after President Obama took office, his administration talks little of a policy of rapprochement toward Iran, and indeed, he has decided to strengthen the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf to counter what he clearly sees as a heightened threat. However, both the European Union and the Americans have wasted much time pursuing a policy of appeasement, which clearly has failed. If we had listened to the right people, we might not have wasted that time.

Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the main opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, announced during a visit to the European Parliament in December 2004 that Iran was like a volcano ready to erupt. That statement was made more than five years ago, and indeed, the volcano has erupted. Iranians have proved they are ready for change. Perhaps we should have listened a little more to Mrs. Rajavi.

The solution to the problem has, in fact, been spelled out by the people of Iran, who have visibly shown that they want internal democratic change. The question we need to ask ourselves is what the West should do to assist in that process as the regime prepares to battle renewed protests expected to launch on Thursday's anniversary of the 1979 revolution.

Ethical issues and economic weapons should be the key factors to pointing the way forward. War clearly is not a viable option. Nor is continued appeasement, not least because the mullahs' regime is incapable of making the concessions required to arrive at an acceptable agreement. Indeed, Iranian officials have admitted that in the current domestic situation, with an increasingly fragile regime, one step back could lead to the government's collapse. So the policy of appeasement we have so consistently pursued has become increasingly irrelevant.

We should, therefore, look to a third option, which has been proposed consistently by the Iranian opposition in exile as the way forward. The third option can be summed up very simply in two short phrases. First, world leaders should lift all political restrictions placed on the Iranian opposition. Second, we should impose a more restricting regime of tougher, comprehensive, targeted but binding sanctions on the mullahs' Iran... Read More

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Refocusing Washington's Policy Lens on Iran

The Huffington Post
February 10, 2010
By Ali Safavi, Member of Iran's Parliament in Exile; President of the Near East Policy Research
On a chilly October day in 1981, after returning home from the University of Michigan campus, I answered a phone call. On the other side of the line was my step mother from Iran. She rarely called those days because of the reign of terror imposed by the regime some five months earlier. In tears, she gave me the distressing news. My older brother, Hossein, had been executed a week earlier.

She told me she had just returned from Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran's main cemetery, where she had laid a wreath on his grave. When I asked the reason for his execution, she simply replied, "Moharebeh" ("waging war against God").

Hossein was a prolific writer and an aerospace engineer from Northrop University, California. We shared an apartment for seven years in west Los Angeles before I left for Michigan to work on my post graduate degree in sociology, and he left for Iran hoping to help rebuild a new democratic country after the Shah's overthrow. A supporter of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), the main Iranian opposition movement, Hossein was executed along with 57 others on September 27, 1981.

Last week, almost 29 years later, when I read reports from Iranian state-run media that 11 protestors are on death row and two others executed on charges of "moharebeh," I felt a chill in my spine and the bitter memories of October 1981 came back. Not only the very people who executed tens of thousands on the charge of moharebeh in the 1980s have once again assumed the reigns of power, but they have also expanded the definition of moharebeh to encompass acts such as hurling stones at security forces!...

MEK members and supporters, who have lost more than 120,000 of their friends and relatives to the Iranian regime, form the biggest organized social network in Iran and a decisive factor for leading the opposition. Restraining them by a politically-motivated label at this crucial moment is a great injustice to the Iranian people.

As the administration grapples with its Iran policy, it should realize that the dichotomy of either military conflict or direct negotiations is a false one. There is a third option presented by the Iranian people and their organized resistance, which avoids the costs of both other options while offering added strategic benefits.

Such refocusing of the American policy lens on the third option will also empower Washington to grasp the facts on the ground in Iran more clearly, enabling it to calibrate its policy more realistically and pragmatically... Read More

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Iran: War, appeasement aren't only options
The Orange County Register

February 3, 2010

By Nasser Sharif, President, Southern California Society for Democracy in Iran, political and human-rights activist
When Iranians poured into the streets of major cities to protest the fraudulent June 2009 presidential elections, many thought the protests would subside in a matter of days. Eight months later, not only were the protesters still out in force, but the focus of the protests has shifted to regime change...

As the Iranian people's democratic struggle deepens and expands, many in Washington are debating what an effective American response should look like. For Washington, this is a major opportunity to diminish Tehran's threats...

Clearly, the ayatollahs will not back down from their nuclear ambitions, a necessity for their strategic survival. That is why President Barack Obama cannot place any hopes on negotiations. What matters is Washington's attitude towards the organized Iranian opposition.

Allowing the Iranian opposition to be heard cannot be rejected as interfering in Iran's internal affairs. If anything, Washington has already been visibly doing that. In 1997, at the behest of the Iranian regime, the Clinton administration blacklisted as a terrorist organization Iran's most organized opposition, the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK), in a move intended as "a goodwill gesture" to the "moderates" ruling Iran.

The UK and European Union followed suit but were forced to detach their politically motivated label in 2008 and 2009, respectively, when their own courts nullified the blacklisting. According to seven court rulings, there is absolutely no evidence the PMOI is involved in terrorism. To the contrary, as senior U.S. officials have stated, it was the PMOI that first revealed the regime's secret nuclear program.

For all its anti-Tehran rhetoric, the Bush administration decided to maintain the PMOI on its terrorism list, in hopes of reaching an accommodation with Tehran. That, of course, rested more on hope than experience.

As it is, the blacklisting of Tehran's strongest opponents in the U.S. has not only given Tehran more leeway to suppress dissent at home, but it is also a major unwarranted concession to the mullahs.

Washington's approach to Iran doesn't need to be stranded between the two undesirable options of war or appeasement. There is a third option, as articulated by the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Maryam Rajavi: democratic change by the Iranian people and their organized resistance movement.

But, with the PMOI blacklisted, that option has been blocked prematurely. Even worse, the blacklisting of PMOI has acted as an enabler for Tehran to murder PMOI members even as the Iranian people are in the process of making history... Read More
 

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Obama's Iran test
The Hill

February 4, 2010

By Lord David Altonof Liverpool, a cross-bench member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom
As President Barack Obama used his first State of the Union address to lash out at Iran over its continuing nuclear defiance, it was clear that 2010 will see a new approach in dealing with Tehran.

How things have changed since, one year ago, in his first sit-down interview, President Barack Obama symbolically used an exchange on Al-Arabiya TV to offer a conciliatory approach in his conduct of American-Iranian relations. President Obama then told the news channel that "if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us."

Well, Tehran's fist has remained well and truly clenched, not least over its nuclear intentions...

We have all watched the recent protests in which Iranians have lined the streets knowing full well that by protesting they could face death or torture. Those same people will be supportive of any economic and diplomatic sanctions which bring an early end to the more than 30 years of ruthless tyrannical rule by Iran's theocratic masters.

In a clear warning to the Iranian population ready to line the streets in the coming weeks, Tehran's leadership recently executed two dissidents accused of plotting to overthrow the regime. At least nine others face execution, accused of having links to the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran. The PMOI is Iran's largest opposition group and analysts believe it has played an integral role in recent unrest throughout Tehran.

One thing should now be clear to President Obama and his allies: Tehran will not unclench its fist when it comes to its nuclear program, and the Iranian people will not yield in their desire for regime change.

The two now go hand in hand, and support for the Iranian people's opposition movement must include the removal of the nuclear safety net which is integral to this regime's survival. As in all such scenarios the leadership must be isolated, and sanctions can achieve this aim. UN Security Council sanctions are critical, but if China continues to play hardball and to use its veto, the West must forge ahead and impose its own comprehensive sanctions and not adopt a set of watered-down sanctions which are symbolic rather than successful, simply to please China.

We can remove Tehran's nuclear safety net and we must do so in order to support the Iranian people's democratic ambitions.... Read More

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