![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2011\/12\/Rees.jpg\" "\\"Rees\\"")
NCRI – On Saturday December 10, on the International Human Rights Day, and on the eve of U.S. President Barack Obama\u2019s meeting with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Washington DC, in a call to President Obama, American and European dignitaries urged annulment of the December 31 deadline on Ashraf and the forcible relocation of its residents inside Iraq, warning of an impending massacre and human catastrophe in Ashraf.<\/p>\n
Speakers to the meeting were: Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance; Andr\u00e9 Glucksmann, author and a member of New France Philosophers; Andrew Card, President Bush Chief of Staff (2001-2006); Bill Richardson, New Mexico Governor (2003-2011) and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Mitchell Reiss, U.S. State Department Head of Strategy Development (2003 \u2013 2005); Alan Dershowitz, one of the most prominent advocates of individual rights and the most well-known criminal lawyer in the world; Geoffrey Robertson QC, prominent British jurist and former appeal judge at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone; Sid Ahmed Ghozali, former Prime Minister of Algeria; Patrick Kennedy, U.S. Congressman (1995-2011); Senator Ingrid Betancourt, Columbian presidential candidate; General David Phillips, U.S. Military Police Commander (2008-2011); Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Le Garrett, Mayor of Paris 1st District; Aude de Thuin, the founder of Women\u2019s Forum for Economics; Cynthia Fleury, West contemporary philosopher.<\/p>\n
Below is speech by Hon. Mitchell Reiss:<\/strong><\/p>\n Gentlemen, distinguished guests, and all those in the audience and watching round the world who cherish freedom and democracy, thank you for inviting me here today, this very special day for human rights.\u00a0 I\u2019m honored to be with you and to be on the same panel with so many outstanding public servants.\u00a0 As you know, this is not the first time we\u2019ve come together to show solidarity with the residents of Camp Ashraf.\u00a0 This is not the first time we\u2019ve come together to speak out on their behalf.\u00a0 This is not the first time we\u2019ve come together to urge the Obama administration to do the right thing and delist the MEK.\u00a0 But I fear that this may be one of the last times that we can come together like this because time is quickly running out.\u00a0 We all know about recent developments in Washington, as the Obama administration continues to delay responding to a court order to explain why it has listed the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization or to take it off the list completely. All these things we know.\u00a0 But there\u2019s a vast difference between knowledge and action.\u00a0 During the last century, countries have failed to stop looming humanitarian disasters, not because they did not have knowledge of what tragedy was about to enfold.\u00a0 They had knowledge, they knew.\u00a0 But instead of acting they chose to look the other way.\u00a0 Why has this happened repeatedly throughout history?\u00a0 A few years ago a Harvard University professor named Samantha Power wrote a powerful book that asked this question entitled A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide.\u00a0 Power concluded that there were three reasons why the United States had allowed preventable massacres to take place.\u00a0 First, American officials told themselves that because they did not know all the details, because they did not have perfect information, because there were two sides to every story, because of these and other rationalizations they did not need to act.\u00a0 In her words they took shelter in the fog of plausible deniability.\u00a0 They used the search for certainty as an excuse for paralysis and postponement.\u00a0 U.S. officials took refuge in the normal operations of the foreign policy bureaucracy which permitted the illusion of continued deliberation, complex activity and intense concern.\u00a0 When officials said they did not know it was because they chose not to.\u00a0 Second, these massacres took place because American officials convinced themselves that there was little they could do to stop the massacres, that the United States had no influence over the calculations of those who systematically killed innocent people.\u00a0 Any intervention would be futile.\u00a0 And since American officials believed that there was nothing the U.S. could do, the U.S. did nothing.\u00a0 Third, American leaders did not act because they simply did not have the will to do so.\u00a0 In fact, they well understand that a humanitarian disaster was about to take place, but they believed that intervention would be too costly in terms of American lives and money.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now all these excuses sound very familiar to all of us who have been involved in the issue of Camp Ashraf and the delisting of the MEK.\u00a0 But the reality is that none of these excuses should apply here.\u00a0 We know all the details we need to know about the murderous intentions of the Iraqi security forces.\u00a0 We know that the MEK has long ago renounced terror.\u00a0 We know that the defenseless residents at Camp Ashraf surrendered all their weapons and placed themselves under the protection of the United States.\u00a0 We also know that the United States does have influence with the Maliki regime in Baghdad.\u00a0 Despite withdrawing all of our combat forces by the end of this year, the U.S. will continue to train Iraqi troops and will continue to provide security, economic and developmental assistance to Iraq.\u00a0 We have leverage to influence Iraq\u2019s behavior if we\u2019re willing to use it.\u00a0 The threat to withhold U.S. support and funding for Baghdad would cost us nothing in terms of American lives and money.\u00a0 But time is fast running out and there is no guarantee that the Obama administration will act.\u00a0 Instead, the administration appears poised to repeat the tragic errors of the Clinton administration, which stood by and watched a looming humanitarian disaster unfold in all its horror.\u00a0 In his memoirs, former President Bill Clinton recounts in painful detail his deep remorse at standing by and doing nothing while 800,000 people in Rwanda were slaughtered.\u00a0 At one point, Clinton writes, \u201cWe were so preoccupied with Bosnia and with the memory of Somalia just six months old and with opposition in Congress to military deployments in faraway places not vital to our national interests, that neither I nor anyone on my foreign policy team, adequately focused on spending troops to stop the slaughter.\u00a0 With a few thousand troops and helps from our allies we could have saved lives.\u00a0 The failure to try to stop Rwanda\u2019s tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.\u201d\u00a0 How ironic that President Clinton\u2019s wife is now the Secretary of State and has the power to remedy the injustice, impending catastrophe at Camp Ashraf.\u00a0 No one is asking Secretary of State Clinton to send troops or to enlist the help of our European allies.\u00a0 All she has to do is delist the MEK and ensure that the residents are given safe passage out of Iraq.\u00a0 [applause] Will she take this decision and will she take it in the next few weeks before it\u2019s too late?\u00a0 Or in a few years\u2019 time, will she join with her husband and express remorse at what could have been?\u00a0 Will we be reading a similar passage in her memoirs about how the failure to stop the final assault on Camp Ashraf was one of her greatest regrets during her stewardship of American foreign policy?\u00a0<\/p>\n As we all know, time is short and the need for action is urgent.\u00a0 So what can we do now?\u00a0 We can continue to pressure Prime minister Maliki to delay closing the camp and allow the UNHCR to do its work.\u00a0 The UNHCR must be allowed to start the process of registering, identifying and interviewing the residents.\u00a0 The U.S. and the European Union have ways to influence his decision making, and we know that he can be influenced.\u00a0 We know that he is sensitive to negative publicity by his claiming in an article in the Washington Post this past week that he is seeking a so-called peaceful solution to Camp Ashraf.\u00a0 When he comes to Washington next week President Obama must tell him to keep the camp open and allow the UNHCR to do their work. [applause]\u00a0 We must also continue to publicize the vulnerability of the camp\u2019s residents.\u00a0 Silence is the enemy of their safety and their freedom.\u00a0 Earlier this year the international community came together to protect the residents of Benghazi in Libya from imminent slaughter.\u00a0 They decided that never again would the world stand by and watch the murder of innocent civilians when they could act and save lives and so they joined together and invoked the international community\u2019s responsibility to protect.\u00a0 If Benghazi, why not Ashraf?\u00a0 The international community has a responsibility to protect the innocent residents of the camp.\u00a0 It is simply not possible to stand by and do nothing.\u00a0 If never again applies to the residents of Benghazi, then it applies to the residents of Camp Ashraf.\u00a0 [applause] The international community cannot claim that they do not know the peril the residents of the camp face every day.\u00a0 Not after the events of April 8th earlier this year that we saw so vividly on that video a few minutes ago.\u00a0 It\u2019s up to us to make sure that all of our voices continue to be heard.\u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, the Obama administration needs to be encouraged to take a more active and aggressive role in pushing back against Iran.\u00a0 We have all seen last month\u2019s IAEA report on Iran\u2019s ongoing nuclear ambitions, and we have read about the Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington D.C. restaurant a few months ago.\u00a0 Dozens of American citizens would have been killed and wounded in this attack if it had been successful.\u00a0 And yet the Obama administration appears intimidated by the mullahs in Tehran.\u00a0 It has not invoked the crippling sanctions on Iran\u2019s banking system that had been promised.\u00a0 It reacted to the assassination plot as if this was only a minor diplomatic dustup.\u00a0 They cited diplomatic protocols, invoked international norms and characterized Tehran\u2019s plot as a violation of international law.\u00a0 No doubt it was that.\u00a0 But let\u2019s call it for what it really was, a direct attack against the United States.\u00a0 In other words, it was an act of war.\u00a0<\/p>\n As we all know the United States has a special responsibility to protect the residents at Camp Ashraf.\u00a0 This responsibility doesn\u2019t end on December 31st.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t end when the last American soldier leaves Iraq.\u00a0 It ends only when all the residents of the camp are safe and secure and allowed to live their lives in peace and in dignity.\u00a0 The fastest, the easiest, the best way to accomplish this goal is to delist the MEK immediately.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thank you very much.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NCRI – On Saturday December 10, on the International Human Rights Day, and on the eve of U.S. President Barack Obama’s meeting with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Washington […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[175],"class_list":{"0":"post-11530","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ashraf-liberty","8":"tag-updated"},"yoast_head":"\n
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We know about the recent developments in Geneva, as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees struggles to gain more time to interview the 3,300 residents of Camp Ashraf so they can qualify for refugee status and resettle elsewhere outside of Iraq.\u00a0 We know that the UN Security Council has recently been alerted to the situation at the camp including the very real possibility of violence.\u00a0 We know about the calculations in Baghdad of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who just last week referred to these residents as terrorists and insurgents, and that he repeated his intention to close the camp by the end of this year.\u00a0 And we certainly know about the poor people at Camp Ashraf who wait nervously as others determine their fate.\u00a0<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2011\/12\/IMG_5121.jpg\" "\\"IMG_5121\\"")
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