Imagine, for a moment, that we are in the not-too-distant future. The United States has launched a pre-emptive missile strike on Iran. A wave of demonstrations reminiscent of those against the 2003 Iraq War has erupted across the UK. With students at the forefront of the protest movement, one university in particular has been identified by the US government as a hotbed of anti-American sentiment. After a phone call from the White House, David Cameron has announced that the University of York will no longer be allowed to remain open.
Acting at the behest of the CIA, British soldiers and armed police attempt to close the University by conducting a series of raids onto our campus with rifles, truncheons and armoured vehicles. Altogether, 49 students are killed and around 1,000 are wounded. Several of your friends are among the dead.
Stepping in to prevent further bloodshed, the United Nations persuades the British government to postpone the closure of the University until the students have been evacuated to a safe location. Under the threat of another massacre, YUSU reluctantly agrees to cooperate. You soon find yourself alongside 3,000 of your fellow students, crammed into a disused army base 70 times smaller than your old campus and surrounded by a 12ft-high concrete wall. There you are monitored by surveillance cameras and eavesdropping devices around the clock, and you are forbidden to leave. Unthinkable though it is in the 21st Century, you are in a concentration camp.
The fate that has befallen you is hypothetical. But it is the very real fate of more than 3,000 men and women of Ashraf City in Iraq.
Although they have lived in Iraq for the past 26 years, the residents of Ashraf are not Iraqis. They are Iranians, forced into exile by the religious fanatics who rule their homeland with an iron fist. They long to return to their own country, but cannot. If they do, they will be tortured and executed for “enmity against God”. Their crime is their unwavering commitment to the ideals of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.
You might have guessed by now that these Iranian dissidents are not the victims of US and British collusion, as in the scenario set out above. Their ruthless persecutors are the government of Iraq, which acts on the orders of its powerful neighbour, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The concentration camp is in Baghdad, not London. Its inmates are Iranian refugees, not British students. But the suffering is the same. And your moral outrage should be the same, too.
The name of the concentration camp, “Hurriyah” (“Liberty”), could have been concocted in the sadistic mind of whoever suggested placing the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”) above the gates of Auschwitz. It is a sick joke, and a permanent insult to the thousands of men and women whose lives the camp has destroyed.
When the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention looked into conditions at Hurriyah in May, its members were shocked to learn how the prisoners are forced to live. Hurriyah lacks the most basic infrastructure and sanitation, electricity is only intermittent and running water is in short supply. The health of the inmates is at risk. Surveillance is constant and intrusive, so the detainees have no privacy. International observers are prevented from entering the camp, as are the prisoners’ relatives and legal counsels.
Unsurprisingly, the Working Group concluded that conditions at Hurriyah “are synonymous with those in a detention centre, as residents have no freedom of movement, nor interaction with the outside world, nor do they have freedom of movement and the semblance of a free life within the camp”. Moreover, the Working Group found “no legal justification” for the internment of Iranians from Ashraf City, which “violates Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
On its own, the Working Group’s statement is a searing condemnation of the Iraqi government. But it seems like a mere slap on the wrist when compared to the words of the former UN human rights official, Tahar Boumedra, who recently resigned in protest over what he alleges is the UN’s practice of “looking the other way” when it comes to the humanitarian atrocity that is Hurriyah. Mr Boumedra, who served as chief of the UN Human Rights Office in Iraq and then as an advisor to the UN’s Special Representative for Iraq, says that the agenda of the Iraqi and Iranian governments is obvious: “To break the exiles’ will and morale.”
With conditions at Hurriyah as they are, they might just succeed. “It reminds me of the concentration camp I lived in as a child during Algeria’s war of liberation,” says Mr Boumedra.