Andrej Mahecic, spokesman for the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva, told The Associated Press Monday that the Ashraf residents could individually apply for refugee status with the UNHCR, which would help them find a permanent home.
But to qualify for UNHCR help, he explained, each exile must personally renounce violence as a means of achieving his or her goals—which he said the Ashraf residents have all refused to do.
Some of the Ashraf residents who have first left the camp and were living on their own have renounced violence and achieved refugee status, Mahecic said.
“The persons who remain in Ashraf today have never taken advantage of this procedure,” he said.
The Mojahedin-e Khalq have proclaimed that they renounced violence as an organization in 2001. The group has been unable to launch attacks across the border on Iran since May 2003, when the camps were captured by the US Army. It is unclear why the organization does not allow its members in Camp Ashraf to renounce violence individually if the organization has done so.
The renunciation of violence was the key to the decision by a British tribunal and by the EU to drop the listing of the Mojahedin-e Khalq as a terrorist organization. The United States still lists the group as terrorist, but it is now reviewing that decision under court order. The refusal of all the Ashraf residents to individually oppose violence would appear to undermine the group’s case.
Several years ago, the United States declared the Camp Ashraf residents to be “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions. It is unclear if that status lapsed at the end of 2008, when Baghdad and Washington signed a security agreement that limited US authority in Iraq.
If the protected status remains, the US would be required to intervene with the Iraqi government on the exiles’ behalf. The US says it no longer has that authority, but the Ashraf residents and their lawyers in Washington contest that.
A spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which oversees whether nations are complying with the Geneva treaties, declined to clarify.