The forgotten campers

Camp Liberty is the camp with the most misleading name and the least publicity for its residents who have been imprisoned without access to water, electricity or food supplies. It has been described as a concentration camp by those now calling for United Nations help to free the refugees from their beleagured state.
How did they get to the camp, formerly a US army base? Before the war on Iraq, they had fled from Iran to take refuge in Iraq, having been armed insurgents against the government. Now they were refugees saying they had given up violence. They built a community with houses and schools, called Camp Ashraf, which was safe for 25 years. During the Iraq war they had the protection of the United States forces.
When the war ended, they lost that protection. The Iraqis attacked them, supported by the Iranians and many were killed. They were no longer safe. The solution? To move them to Camp Liberty, with promises of a better life.
This has turned out to be a hollow promise. Struan Stevenson, the Scottish MEP who is President of the European Parliament's delegation for relations with Iraq, in an impassioned speech to the Parliament, said that more than 2000 refugees had voluntarily left Camp Ashraf and moved to Liberty. But instead of the safety and facilities they had been promised they found themselves in a slum, with dilapidated containers for living accommodation, broken sewage pipes, intermittent electricity and no running water. Around half of them women, they were now completely at the mercy of the Iraq military. Requests to have main water supplies and vital medicines and disabled equipment had been blocked, along with food supplies.
The list of torments goes on and on, with protests coming from Church leaders in Britain, American politicians and the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran freedom. The latter are protesting about the appointment of the same colonel who ordered the raids on Ashraf which killed 49 unarmed residents to head talks to decide the fate of those at Camp Liberty. The dissidents' organisation, the anti-mullah People's Mujahedin of Iran, is still waiting for Hilary Clinton to remove the"terrorist" label, already removed by the UK and the EU.
A protest rally in Paris last month drew a crowd of an estimated 100,000 supporters, with Western leaders as well as Iranians from around the world. Even so, there was comparatively little international press coverage.
The besieged Camp Liberty residents, held captive by Iraq troops and those still left in Camp Ashraf, are asking for the United Nations to recognise them as political refugees and to give them asylum. How safe are they until then? ends