Self-Sacrifice (16 page)

It is difficult not to condemn utterly America’s betrayal of the Ashraf residents from start to finish. In fact it is interesting that the April 2011 and July 2009 attacks against Ashraf both occurred when the US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, was in Baghdad. In fact both attacks happened only hours after he met with Nouri al-Maliki, suggesting that the attacks could almost have had Washington’s blessing!

1.
Gheidan was commander of the ground forces and was later responsible for crushing the Sunnis’ peaceful rallies. During the ISIS attack on Mosul, he disgracefully ran away and was later dismissed for his cowardice.

22

Interviews with Political Prisoners in Tirana, Albania, August 2014

Fatimeh Nabavi Chashmi

‘My name is Fatimeh Nabavi; I am 45 years old and a member of the PMOI. I was born into a religious family and my father is a cleric. During the 1980s, many of my friends and relatives were arrested and imprisoned for being supporters of the PMOI. Two of my relatives by the names of Hojat Emadi and Emad Nabavi were executed. When Hojat Emadi was executed they did not even inform his family of his execution. When Hojat’s father was about to go to visit him in prison, the guards came to their home and brought Hojat’s bloodstained shoes to his family and claimed that they had executed him and there was no longer any need for them to go to the prison to visit their son. Needless to say this was extremely shocking to Hojat’s Mum and Dad, causing them to have nervous breakdowns.

In 1988, because of my support for the PMOI and opposition to Khomeini’s regime, I was being pursued by the regime, so I was forced to leave my country and I later went to Ashraf. After the regime realised that I had fled the country, they put my family under immense pressure and surveillance. My family lived under constant fear of arrest and execution. My Mum had several nervous breakdowns. Having committed no crimes or broken any laws, in an attempt to exert pressure on my family, during the 1990s the regime forced two of my brothers out of the city and to exile. This was one of the tactics of the regime to try to make life miserable for PMOI families. My brothers spent many years away from their families.

Following the US invasion and the creation of a provisional government by the coalition forces in Iraq, the road to Iraq was opened. During that time many PMOI supporters travelled to Iraq to join the PMOI in Ashraf. In 2005 my brother went to Iraq and joined the PMOI. When he got to Camp Ashraf he told me that many young
people would like to come to Ashraf. After a while my Mum and Dad along with my three brothers and sisters came to Ashraf to see me. They were amazed about the security of the camp. When my family was getting ready to go back to Iran, my brother Javad said that he would not return with the rest of the family and would instead stay in Ashraf to join the struggle against the regime. He is now in Camp Liberty.

At that time another relative of mine, by the name of Mojtaba Nabavi Chashmi, who had also come to visit Ashraf, decided that he did not want to go back to Iran and requested to join the PMOI in their struggle to bring freedom for the Iranian people. He is also now in Camp Liberty; Mojtaba was followed by Ammar and Marzieh and later by Assadollah, Saeed and Hadi, who were all part of my extended family. They all came to Ashraf and then requested to remain there. After a while Emmad, Vahideh, Maryam and Maryeh also came to Ashraf. This happened at a time when the regime wasn’t paying much attention to people coming to Ashraf to join the Mojahedin. When they realised that the young people were coming and joining the PMOI in Ashraf, they started to put inhumane pressure on our families. They started with arresting my Mum, Dad, sisters and brothers. They took my 80-year-old father, who had not committed any crime, to prison and intimidated him in every possible way. They asked him why he had gone to Ashraf, and informed him that going to Ashraf to visit the Mojahedin was considered a crime. His interrogators told my father that he was not qualified to wear a clerical robe and from that point on he was not able to function as a cleric or go to the mosque and lead people in prayers. They also ordered him to stop supporting the PMOI. Their intention was to break my father but my father resisted their pressure. He said, ‘I have no need for the clergy’s robe,’ and went back to Shahmirzad, the village where he had lived for years and was loved by all the inhabitants of the village. The people of Shahmirzad later asked him to become their prayer leader. The regime’s agents kept on pressuring him to try to have him condemn the PMOI and stop his support, but my father never surrendered.

In prison his interrogator had told him, “You have become like a thorn in our side.” After my father, they arrested and tortured my
brothers. Two years ago I heard the news of my brother’s arrest from Simaye Azadi television. Both my brothers were sent to prison in another province and not even allowed a visit by their wives and kids. My sister-in-law had just given birth, but they would not allow my brother to see his newborn baby. They kept on exerting this kind of pressure to break our family.

Maliki had promised Khamenei to increase the pressure on the PMOI. In keeping his promise he besieged Ashraf, and on 28 and 29 July 2009 launched a military attack on the camp. As it has been seen through the documented videos available, Maliki’s forces attacked the Mojahedin using live bullets, axes, Humvees, high-pressure water cannons and bulldozers. The Mojahedin resisted empty-handed. My brother Mohammad Kazem, who was one of the singers in a traditional music group in Ashraf, had both his hands broken as a result of being hit with an axe. Both his hands were in plaster for three months and his comrades had to help him to accomplish his personal chores. He was not even able to lift a cup of water or brush his teeth.

In another attack, on 8 April 2011, my second brother Mohammad Javad was shot in the leg. On the same day my niece Maryam was also shot in the leg, and for months and because of the siege on Ashraf, the Iraqi government would not allow her to leave Ashraf to go to the hospital and to have the bullet removed. After several months the doctors in Ashraf managed to remove the bullet from her leg. She suffered severe pain for several months because of the inhumane medical siege imposed on Ashraf. The epic heroism displayed by the residents during the massacres of 28 and 29 July and 8 April did not cease on those days, but it has continued in the resistance of the survivors to this day, in the hope that one day we will get the answer to all our pain and suffering through the freedom of our people.

A few years ago I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. During the past few years of the medical siege on Ashraf and the inhumane psychological warfare waged on us, my illness has been getting worse on a daily basis. The medical siege added to the hardship we endured. My doctor used to tell me that, with your illness you have to sit in a place where there is a lot of shade and greenery, but I was instead forced into a place where there was no sign of any greenery or shade. I kept asking myself, what is our protected persons’ status for? What
happened when the Americans took our arms and promised us protection in return? Why did they lie to us?

Albania agreed to accept a number of the residents, and I was one of those people put on the list to go to Albania. In 2013, despite the fact I really wanted to stay with the rest of my friends, I was transferred to Albania. Through the insistence of my friends I was taken to hospital, where I started my treatment. My doctor informed me that I was suffering from epilepsy as well and my nervous system has been compromised. After a year of treatment and support from my friends, my condition has somewhat stabilised.

I also have a 26-year-old son who lives in the United States and who has got his Masters degree in Business Administration. Because of the siege placed on Ashraf and Liberty, he could not come and visit me when I was there. When I was transferred to Albania he came to see me. We were so happy to see each other after years of separation. My son told me that he was looking forward to seeing his father, but the inaction of international organisations with respect to Ashraf had led to a catastrophe, leaving him with the pain of not being able to see his father ever again, as he learned that he was one of the 52 killed during the 1 September 2013 massacre in Ashraf.’

23

Baghdad

In early 2011, I had demanded the right to take a small team of MEPs from my Delegation for Relations with Iraq to Baghdad. Our visas were issued in early April, just days before the massacre in Ashraf. This was fortuitous, as they almost certainly would have been withheld following the atrocities at the camp. So we were all set to go and we were given intensive security training and warned that there were considerable risks involved. We were told that travelling outside the so-called ‘Green Zone’ – the high security area in the centre of Baghdad – was lethally dangerous and should be avoided.

My team consisted of myself and three other MEPs, Mario Mauro (Italy), John Attar Montalto (Malta) and Jelko Kacin (Slovenia). We arrived at the International Airport in Baghdad on 25 April 2011. Baghdad was still a war-zone. The streets were entombed in heavy concrete. Tanks or armoured cars sat at every corner. Machine-guns poked out from behind heaps of sandbags. Concrete bunkers and watchtowers were everywhere. Politicians moved around the city in heavily armoured vehicles. For our high-speed journey from the airport to the Green Zone, we were made to wear full body armour and were taken in pairs inside armoured Lexus 4-WDs, with Iraqi drivers and European security guards, each brandishing sub-machine guns and pistols.

Our friendly British security guard was a former paratrooper called Mark, from Birmingham. He said he was married to a Scottish girl from Inverness, but only got home to see her every five or six weeks. As we drove out through the numerous security checks surrounding Baghdad’s International Airport, he explained that we were about to drive along ‘Irish Street, once the most dangerous street in the world.’ Reassuringly he said that nowadays there are only occasional roadside bombs and isolated attacks on passing convoys like ours! I asked how well our Lexus would withstand an explosion from
an improvised explosive device (IED), and he said that he recently saw a similar vehicle blown several metres into the air by one, then it landed on its roof and yet all of the passengers emerged unhurt!

With this information ringing in my ears, we raced on towards the city and the first major roadblocks, where queues of cars stood waiting to be searched and the occupants’ identities checked. Mark pointed to two large craters in the road just outside the Green Zone, where suicide bombers had rammed cars into the waiting traffic only a week previously, killing 12 people and injuring more than 50. This was quite unusual, he said, as mostly now al-Qaeda were using a new tactic involving targeted assassinations of Iraqi military and police personnel, usually at roadblocks. ‘They use handguns fitted with silencers and when the soldier or policeman taps on their window to ask for their ID, they open the window and shoot him in the face, before racing off to repeat the performance at the next checkpoint,’ he explained cheerfully. 81 people had been killed in this way in the 16 days before we arrived.

High, thick concrete walls, topped with razor wire, surrounded our compound in the middle of the Green Zone. A Kalashnikovtoting guard stood at the main entrance gate. I was shown to my underground bunker-room where a notice pinned to the back of my door said: ‘The signal for a missile/mortar attack will be a continuous warbling siren and flashing red lights.’ A khaki-green helmet lay ominously on top of the bedroom drawers, next to a heavy set of body armour.

I soon discovered that missiles and mortars were a daily part of Baghdad life. Usually they were fired from the remote and desperately poor suburb called Sadr-city, named after Muqtada al-Sadr, the ferociously anti-American Islamic cleric who controls the black-clad Mahdi Army, and is now an elected member of the Iraqi Parliament. Muqtada al-Sadr takes his orders from Iran. He had openly threatened to reignite the insurgency if the Americans did not stick to their promise of complete withdrawal from Iraq by the end of the year. It was a serious threat.

On our way to visit the Polish Ambassador in the early evening we could suddenly hear sirens wailing. Mark got onto his walkie-talkie and announced that there was ‘an incoming on the way.’

‘An incoming what,’ I nervously enquired.

‘Oh it’s probably just a rocket or a mortar,’ said Mark. ‘They’re usually aimed at the American Embassy in the heart of the Green Zone, so we should be OK.’

Sure enough, a few seconds later the ‘All Clear’ signal sounded and Mark received a message on his radio confirming that the mortar had in fact landed in the River Tigris. As we were driving along the side of the River Tigris, this was not entirely reassuring.

At the Polish Ambassador’s residence we met for dinner with a number of EU ambassadors. We were given an initial comprehensive briefing on the prevailing situation inside Iraq. We were told that Baghdad only had around six hours electricity per day, but they were hoping to reach up to 18 hours per day by the end of the summer, when temperatures can rise to over 50°C, and without air-conditioning, tempers can fray. Kurdistan in particular was thriving economically, with around 10% annual growth, against a background of relative safety and political stability. The general picture seemed to be that Iraq was gradually clawing its way out of the nightmare that it had suffered under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, followed by the US/British invasion and the subsequent insurgency that left tens of thousands dead and the major cities devastated. There seemed to be a consensus among the EU ambassadors that Iraq was potentially open for business and we should do nothing to jeopardise the chance for lucrative business contracts. I can’t say that I was convinced by their arguments!

I thanked the Polish Ambassador for his hospitality and said that we were here in Baghdad in the immediate wake of the horrific massacre at Camp Ashraf and it was my duty as Head of the Delegation to demand an independent inquiry into the 8 April atrocities, when 36 unarmed civilians from the PMOI were killed and many hundreds injured. I said that the EU must enter into urgent negotiations with the PMOI, the Iraqi government, the US and UNAMI to find a long-term solution to this crisis and to prevent further bloodshed. The re-settlement of the 3,400 residents of Ashraf to the US and to EU Member States was the only feasible option, and would have to be brokered before the end of 2011, the deadline set by the Iraqi government for the closure of Ashraf. However, negotiations could only begin if the
Iraqi government first withdrew its military forces from Ashraf, provided urgent medical attention for the critically injured, ended the siege of the camp and restored relative normality to the situation.