![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2012\/02\/govhowarddean.jpg\" "\\"govhowarddean\\"")
NCRI – A European-American Conference was convened on invitation of the Friends of Free Iran intergroup in the European Parliament on February 7, in relation to the current political situation in Iran and the region, and the necessity of protecting Ashraf residents, members of the Iranian opposition.<\/p>\n
DEAN former US Presidential candidate and former Chairman of the Democratic National Convention<\/strong>: Thank you very much.\u00a0 And thank you [no audio].\u00a0 Let me thank first\u2014got it?\u00a0 Okay, double.\u00a0 [laughter] Let me thank the European Union, it\u2019s an honor to be here in the European Parliament.\u00a0 The European Union and the Parliament is essentially now the moral conscience of the world.\u00a0 If you look at most of the areas that necessitate regulation of human behaviors, the EU has the most progressive labor law in the world; the EU Has the most progressive environmental law in the world; the European Union has the most progressive financial laws in the world; and you have the most progressive human rights laws in the world.<\/p>\n \u00a0 So the European Union is a critical group that must play a role in this, even though this impending disaster was not of your making.\u00a0 This impending disaster, which we have put off by getting the deadline extended, was caused in principle\u2014the ingredients were caused, of course, by a dictator who\u2019s masquerading as a democrat with a small D, and by an impetuous American government who I believe committed the largest foreign policy blunder in the history of the United States, including the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n So what do we have here now?\u00a0 We have a country which had an election, and the person with the most votes did not get to be prime minister.\u00a0 We have a prime minister who\u2019s consolidating his power by becoming not only the prime minister, but holding interior and defense ministries for himself and not sharing them in the coalition agreement that he agreed with.\u00a0 In short, the governance situation in Iraq is deteriorating very, very rapidly.\u00a0 And I\u2019m here in the European Union to appeal to your sense of human rights and human decency, which is the most finely held sense on the face of the earth right now, and has been for the last few decades.\u00a0 There is a group, as you know, we\u2019ve been speaking about it, 3,400 unarmed civilians who are at Camp Ashraf in Iraq.\u00a0 Now we know something about these civilians.\u00a0 When the American troops arrived at Ashraf in 2003, we disarmed the camp.\u00a0 And we did so with their cooperation.\u00a0 And in exchange for the cooperation that they gave the American troops when we disarmed them, we gave each one of the residents in Ashraf a piece of paper signed by the American military commander that said that we would make sure that no harm came to them.\u00a0 We have violated that pledge in the United States.\u00a0 These civilians have been unarmed for nearly nine years, or nearly ten years.\u00a0 And not only did we disarm them and promise them we would protect them, we also had the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI counterterrorism team, interview every single resident in Ashraf one by one.\u00a0 And the final report showed that there was no association and there were no terrorists in the camp.\u00a0 These are truly civilians that have been judged by the American intelligence agency and American troops, not to have connections with terrorism, not to be terrorists themselves.\u00a0 And each one of them has a piece of paper signed by the American representative that had promised that they would be protected.<\/p>\n So what we see now is a specter of a massacre, of genocide, the dictator Maliki against a group of people because they are Iranians.\u00a0 And this of course is promulgated by the enormous influence that the mullahs had over the Iraqi government.\u00a0 This situation of course the Iraqis have to take some responsibility for.\u00a0 It\u2019s their people that are committing these murders, 47 of them in all over the last three years.\u00a0 But the United States has an enormous amount of responsibility, which they are pretending they don\u2019t have.\u00a0 The United States of America has responsibility for making sure that the 3,400 people in Ashraf are alive and are moved out of the country safely.\u00a0 That is our responsibility.\u00a0 The United Nations has a responsibility.\u00a0 So the first thing I call upon member of the European Parliament to do is to put pressure not just on the Iraqi government but on the American government to do what they said they were going to do nine years ago.\u00a0 This is an American responsibility but we need the extraordinary moral presence and the moral compass of the European Union in order to make it clear that the Americans must, must comply with the obligations of their own responsibility which they took willfully nine years ago.<\/p>\n The National Council of Resistance and the MEK have done their jobs.\u00a0 You have heard Madame Rajavi say that they are ready to be transferred.\u00a0 Even a relatively small number are ready to be transferred, although the camp is not ready.\u00a0 The United States needs to adopt a plan where we will begin the transfer of Ashraf residents to Liberty, but before we transfer them all we must show our good faith to find them places to go.\u00a0 The United States has indicated privately a willingness to take some Ashraf refugees, and it is important that the European Union countries do that too.\u00a0 This is a difficult thing to do.\u00a0 We see the tone of debate in the European countries, especially those getting ready for election, that single out groups, Muslims, immigrants.\u00a0 The same thing is going on in the United States.\u00a0 This is not helpful, in order to resettle the people who are at Ashraf.\u00a0 But we must stand up against the base political instincts, that are used in elections, in order to do the right thing, both in the United States, and in the European Union.<\/p>\n It is true that Camp Liberty is not ready.\u00a0 The fact of the matter is that not only are the conditions of the MOU been violated, but they do not have water in Camp Liberty.\u00a0 The most basic human need is not available to Liberty, and supposedly is going to be brought in by contractors, which the Ashrafis, in the Iraqi government\u2019s munificence, will be allowed to pay for the water if they can find a contractor that dares to brave the thugs of Maliki in order to get the water through to the camp.\u00a0 We call upon the government of Iraq to get the camp ready so that we may begin the process immediately of moving the people at Ashraf out of Iraq to safety.\u00a0 The government of the United States must use whatever leverage it takes in order to keep the government of Iraq to its word.<\/p>\n Finally, one of the biggest obstacles and the biggest excuses that governments use to stop the process of resettling the Iranian refugees in Ashraf is the unlawful listing of the MEK as a terrorist organization in the United States.\u00a0 The truth is the European Union is not entirely blameless.\u00a0 The reason that the MEK came off the terrorist list in the European Union is because a series of court battles went on in the UK and in France the French government and the British government lost every single court decision.\u00a0 And finally the governments complied with what their courts were telling them to do and remove the MEK from the terrorist list.\u00a0 In the United States there has already been one court decision which required that the MEK be reevaluated by the State Department because they had not been treated with due process.\u00a0 And the State Department has ignored the rule of law in the United States.\u00a0 Our government must obey the rule of law.\u00a0 They have not yet done so.\u00a0 The MEK must be delisted not just because it\u2019s a democratic force for reforming Iran.\u00a0 It must be delisted because it is incredibly difficult to locate people in other countries who are on the terrorist list in the United States of America.\u00a0 So while the United States of America is telling us that they are willing to observe the humanitarian needs of the people of Ashraf, they are making it impossible for us to deliver on those needs because they maintain them on the list. They must be removed from the list right now in order that we relocate 3,400 innocent civilians.\u00a0 And if the United States fails to do that then no proclamation by any government of the United States that we care about human rights will be taken seriously.<\/p>\n So, let me conclude by saying what I said at the opening.\u00a0 This is a humanitarian crisis.\u00a0 Thirty-four hundred lives are at stake.\u00a0 The European Union has done a good job in putting pressure on the United States and the United Nations and the government of Iraq.\u00a0 We need you to do more.\u00a0 I conclude with what I always like to say when I come to groups and address them in Europe.\u00a0 The Americans can be fairly accused of often acting without thinking.\u00a0 But if there is a fault in Europe you sometimes think without acting.\u00a0 The time now is for action because nothing but action will save 3,400 innocent lives in Ashraf.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NCRI – A European-American Conference was convened on invitation of the Friends of Free Iran intergroup in the European Parliament on February 7, in relation to the current political situation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[175],"class_list":{"0":"post-11684","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![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2012\/02\/Brussels-Conf-7-Feb.jpg\" "\\"Brussels-Conf-7-Feb\\"")
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