Khavaran Cemetery in southern Tehran, it is believed that mass graves housed many political prisoners and executed the 1988 massacre
On July 17, Morgan Ortagus, a U.S. State Department spokesman, briefly commented on the impunity of the Iranian judiciary after decades of human rights violations. “All Iranian officials who engage in human rights violations or abuses deserve to be held accountable,” he said. “The United States calls on the foreign network to conduct independent investigations and to be held accountable and to bring justice to those who suffer from these horrific human rights violations organized through the Iranian regime.”
Ortagus ‘ drew attention to two of these violations, one well publicized in Western political circles and the other ignored by the foreign community. First, he noted that July 11 marked the anniversary of the “brutal murder of Iranian-Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi,” who had been arrested and tortured for covering popular protests in Tehran in 2003. Ortagus designated July 19 as another anniversary: the creation of a “death commission” to bathe Iranian prisoners.
– Morgan Ortagus (@statedeptspox) 17 July 2020
The death commissions were the product of a fatwa through the founder of the devout regime Ruhollah Khomeini, who declared that organized opposition to this regime was an example of “enmity opposed to God” and punishable by death. The regime began to temporarily eliminate major opposition resources, and the Mujahideen People’s Organization of Iran (WIPO-MEK) has become the main target of the mass executions that followed.
The purpose of the death commissions was to interrogate political prisoners in many Iranian prisons and whether they still had resentment towards the formula that had imprisoned them for their political ideals. In the case of WIPO, these ideals were explained by promoting a democratic election to the nascent theocracy. And the concept of abandoning beyond resentment has become absurd to the organization through the number of deaths it had already suffered in the years leading up to the death commissions.
In 1981, WIPO organized a demonstration, with more than one million participants marching in the construction of parliament to call for a minimum of freedom already at a disadvantage through the regime. Thousands of nonviolent protesters were shot with live ammunition through security forces and members of the scattered crowd were arrested indiscriminately. This early stage between the regime and the other people has established a trend that would be known time and time again, through the week-long demonstration in 2003, the 2009 protests and the 3 national uprisings that have rocked Iran since the end of 2017.
In the spaces between these incidents, all dissidents, most commonly members and supporters of WIPO, have suffered countless arbitrary arrests, executions and assassinations on political grounds. WIPO has lost 120,000 members to this type of political violence. But up to a quarter of this number lost their lives at the hands of the death commissions, for several months in 1988.
With writing already on the wall about the history of the regime of human rights violations, many dissidents have explicitly rejected the demands of the death commissions to renounce their former affiliations and claim allegiance to the regime. They went to the regime gallows in staggering numbers, where they were executed in teams of several at once until the total number of casualties exceeded 30,000 victims.
The actual number of these patients would probably never have been known for certain, as Tehran has sometimes imposed public silence on the 1988 bloodbath factor and has tried to systematically destroy evidence of its scope and details. In addition to the burial of many victims in secret mass graves, some of these wells have become the site of structure projects that threaten to seriously impede any foreign effort to identify and read about them, and to explain their number and identity. buried there
Fortunately, some of the mass graves are already known through Iranian national militant groups. Many of these same activists have contacted the foreign network over the years with testimonies of the 1988 massacre. It is largely through these testimonies that the foreign network has at least a partial understanding of the seriousness of the crime, which included the hanging of adolescents and pregnant women.
In 2016, opposition president-elect Maryam Radjavi filed a “motion for justice” for those who suffered the 1988 massacre. This motion has since won foreign and domestic support.
A month after the crusade introduced in 2016, an audio recording released at the time of the bloodbath highlighted other dimensions of the crime. In it, Khomeini’s successor, Hossein Ali Montazeri, described the death commissions as guilty of the “worst crime of the Islamic Republic”. As a result, Montazeri lost his post and spent the last years of his life under space arrest, while direct participants in the bloodbath were rewarded with increasingly influential positions in the theocratic government.
These promotions highlight the fact that the entire regime continues its “worst crime.” And this in turn shows the absurdity of statements beyond some Western governments that urge the regime to conduct its own internal investigation and hold death commissions accountable under Iranian law.
These do not have a practical price in good appearance for Tehran consciousness. Fortunately, there are tentative symptoms of progression in Western technique towards human rights issues in Iran, after Morgan Ortagus’ in the 1988 bloodbath and the underlying functioning of Iranian justice.
The true verification of this progression will be whether the foreign network will agree with the State Department’s position and file similar appeals. Such a statement is frankly for any country that wishes to be taken seriously as a global human rights defender. It is also essential at this time in Iranian history, as the regime has intensified its political violence in reaction to the demanding domestic situations of an organized resistance movement that sees the end of Tehran’s era of impunity.
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