30
Years on From the 1988 Iranian Massacre and No One Has Been Brought to Justice
Thirty
years ago, one of the worst massacres of the 20th century happened in Iran on
the orders of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini.
Scared of
the Iranian Resistance group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), and
the Iranian people’s widespread support of them, Khomeini issued a fatwa that all MEK members being held as political
prisoners should be exterminated.
Over the
course of just a few months, 30,000 MEK members were subjected to mock trials and
executed, regardless of their previous sentencing or even if they’d already
served their prison term.
These
trials were presided over by a Death Commission of four members in each area of
Iran. The Tehran death commission included 2017 Presidential candidate Ebrahim
Raisi and justice minister until 2017 Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, who has said that
he was proud of his role. The current justice minister, Alireza Avaie, served
on the death commission in southwestern Iran.
The death
comissions asked the prisoners if they were still a member of the MEK and
sentenced them to death if they said “yes”. Prisoners who said “no” were then
asked if they would denounce the MEK on television, help to execute other
prisoners, and clear minefields between Iran and Iraq by running through them.
If they answered “no”, they were also executed.
This
massacre was so appalling that even some Mullahs spoke out against it at the
time, like Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, who was second-in-command.
He told
the Tehran Death Commission that they were committiing “the greatest crime [in]
the reign of the Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us” and that
this obseesion with murdering the MEK had begun long before the massacre.
Khomeini
sacked his hand-picked successor and Montazeri spent the rest of his life under
house arrest. We only know about his speech because of an audio tape leaked by
his son in August 2016, for which the son was imprisoned by the mullahs.
The
ruling Mullahs have long tried to bury evidence of their crimes, including
imprisoning relatives of the victims who asked about the fate of their loved
ones and destroying the mass graves where they buried the MEK members.
This
massacre is widely regarded as the worst crime against humanity since WW2, but
no one has yet been held responsible for it. Instead, those responsible hhave
been protected and promoted for their vile crimes.
They need
to be brought to justice and assigning an independent international commission
to investigate is a good first step, which both the National Council of
Resistance (NCRI),
former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran Asma
Jahangir, and former UN Human Rights official Tahar Boumedra approve of. But
the rest of the world needs to work together to get justice for these 30,000
victims of the Iranian Regime.
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