Washington respects any Iraqi decision regarding members of the dissident group People’s Mujahedin of Iran but urges caution, the U.S. State Department said.Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said this week that members of the PMOI/MKO/MEK would be relocated from their Camp Ashraf enclave in Diyala province first to Baghdad and then to a desert outpost in the Shiite south of the country.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says Baghdad is serious about forcing members of a terrorist anti-Iranian group out of his country.Maliki said the Mujahedin-e Khlaq Organization (MKO), which have the blood of thousands of Iranian citizens on their hand, will be quarantined in a far-fetched region south of Iraq before leaving the country.
Iraq plans to uproot an Iranian exile group that has become a headache for the Baghdad government and move the activists to a remote southern area until it can expel them, the prime minister said this week. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki vowed to oust members of the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI), an Iranian opposition movement that the United States considers a terrorist organisation, from a camp northeast of Baghdad where they have been living for two decades.
… The transfer of Camp Ashraf residents to buildings in Baghdad represents a significant step forward in finding an eventual humanitarian solution to the necessary expulsion of the MKO from Iraq…Since no western country has been willing to take any of the MKO/MEK/PMOI members, Iraq has looked inside its own borders for a solution…
Iraq will move exiled Iranian dissidents based at a camp close to the border between the two countries to Baghdad, a government spokesman said on Thursday.”We will move residents of Camp Ashraf to buildings in Baghdad on Tuesday,”he said, without giving details. The members of the People’s Mujahedeen have lived at Camp Ashraf, a refugee base in Diyala province north of the Iraqi capital, for more than 20 years.
while he was in Jordan, Mr Stevenson again raised the issue of the MKO in Iraq and how they could be helped. Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs answered that Mr. Stevenson “could resolve the situation by offering all 3400 PMOI refugees visas to come to live in Scotland!” No doubt this was not the kind of help Mr. Stevenson was looking for. ..
… Thus, the armed strategy of liberation hitting its end, since the organization[MKO/MEK/PMOI] must abandon its concentration camp, what will Rajavi’s alternative will be? Relocation of Ashraf to any other land necessarily means that an alternative is crucial to the survival of the organization . Can it be a thorough negation and renouncement of the ideologically inwoven armed strategy to replace it with a purely political one identical to other active opposition in abroad? ..
PMOI or MEK, the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, military and sectarian organization protected by Saddam Hussein, had been unarmed after the fall of the dictator but kept warm by the troops of the Anglo-Saxon occupation until July 28 2009, when the camp was taken over by Iraqi forces under the security agreement signed between Washington and Baghdad in November 2008…
… Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: Why is no European nation, or North America, willing to accept any of the residents of Camp Ashraf? May it have something to do with their previous activities? Is the Minister absolutely determined either to prove that the Camp Ashraf residents cannot return to the Islamic Republic of Iran or to press European nations to bring them out? What responsibility do the Iraqi Government have to keep these former enemies of the Iraqi people? …
… Our demand is fair, we do not force them to return to Iran and do not allow them to stay permanently in Camp Ashraf. There is no place for them in Iraq after the crimes they have committed against the Iraqi people by exercising their terrorism and because of their cooperation with the Baathists and their interference in Iraq’s domestic affairs …