Two of the major crises the international
community is currently engaged with are terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
Iran, in particular, is negatively involved in both fields, being known as the
central banker of international terrorism, and suspicious for its own
controversial nuclear program at home parallel to its nuclear/missile
collaboration with North Korea.
As these subjects are of significant importance
and deserve even more attributed attention, what must not go neglected is the
fact that Iran is taking advantage of such circumstances to continue an equally
important campaign of belligerence against its own people. The scope of human
rights violations carried out by Tehran is continuously on the rise, with the
ruling regime interpreting the mentioned international crises as windows of
opportunity to extend its domestic crackdown.
And yet, a promising report issued from the
United Nations has shed very necessary light on a specific dossier Iran has
gone the limits throughout the past three decades to cloak. In 1988 the Iranian
regime carried out an atrocious massacre sending tens of thousands of political
prisoners to the gallows. Unfortunately, the world has until recently remained
silent in this regard.
Twenty nine years after the atrocious carnage,
Asma Jahangir, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in
Iran, issued a report on September 2nd for
the first time referring to the massacre of over 30,000 political prisoners,
mostly members and supporters of the Iranian opposition People's Mojahedin
Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
This document, coupled with a note by UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and presented to the UN General Assembly,
has for the first time specifically attributed a number of articles to the 1988
massacre. Thousands of men, women and juveniles were sent to the gallows, and
buried in mass, unmarked graves, all according to a fatwa, or
decree, issued by the deceased Iranian regime founder Ayatollah Khomeini.
Raising the stakes to a level Tehran has sought
to avoid through the years, this damning UN report has called for an
independent and thorough inquiry into these crimes to unearth the truth of the
atrocities carried out in the summer of 1988.
Activists and the Iranian Diaspora have for 29
years focused their measures on presenting evidence of the killings. This has
finally been acknowledged in this UN report.
“Between July and August
1988, thousands of political prisoners, men, women and teen-agers, were
reportedly executed pursuant to a fatwa issued by the then Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Khomeini. A three-man commission was reportedly created with a view
to determining who should be executed. The bodies of the victims were
reportedly buried in unmarked graves and their families never informed of their
whereabouts. These events, known as the 1988 massacres, have never been
officially acknowledged. In January 1989, the Special Representative of the
Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in the Islamic
Republic of Iran, Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, expressed concern over the “global
denial” of the executions and called on Iranian authorities to conduct an
investigation. Such an investigation has yet to be undertaken.”
The atrocities, of such grave nature, rendered a
major rift amongst the regime’s leadership and highest authorities. The late
Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, then Khomeini’s designated successor,
expressed his opposition to the killings and the massacre came back to haunt a
presidential hopeful in the most recent such election held back in May.
“In August 2016, an audio
recording of a meeting held in 1988 between high-level State officials and
clerics was published. The recording revealed the names of the officials who
had carried out and defended the executions, including the current Minister of
Justice, a current high court judge, and the head of one of the largest
religious foundations in the country and candidate in the May presidential
elections. Following the publication of the audio recording, some clerical
authorities and the chief of the judiciary admitted that the executions had
taken place and, in some instances, defended them.”
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