Reporting by PMOI/MEK
Iran, September 25, 2021—Countless families across Iran have been devastated by the summer 1988 massacre that resulted in over 30,000 political prisoners being executed by the mullahs’ regime. The majority of the victims, above 90 percent according to various accounts, were members and supporters of the Iranian opposition People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), indicating the regime’s specific intent to literally eradicate the entity it considered its main threat.
Ms. Farideh Goudarzi, currently a PMOI/MEK member in Albania, was arrested by the Iranian regime in 1983 for the “crime” of being a PMOI/MEK supporter at the time. She spent years in Iran’s prisons and even gave birth to her son while held in solitary confinement. She is also a witness to and survivor of 1988 massacre and has lost family members in this massive killing spree.
“Like all other political prisoners, I was taken to the torture chamber from the first hour of my arrest when I was arrested,” Ms. Goudarzi recalls from the first days of horrific ordeal.
“I was placed on a bed, and five or six interrogation guards were in the room. One of the guards was whipping my hands with a cable, while another was slapping me in the face. [Current regime President] Ebrahim Raisi was standing in the corner of the room and watching the entire process,” she adds.
Raisi has long served in various senior posts of the regime’s so-called judiciary system for decades. During the 1988 massacre he was appointed as one of the senior members of the mullahs’ notorious “Death Commissions” that determined the fate of each prisoner in kangaroo courts that lasted mere minutes. Any prisoner showing even the slightest impression of loyalty to the MEK was sentenced to death immediately.
“I was in solitary confinement for about seven months following my arrest and my child was born just two weeks after being thrown into incommunicado. The circumstances were very difficult. I had to raise my son in solitary confinement for about six and a half months,” Ms. Goudarzi explains.
Shocking testimonies of the survivors of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran
Farideh Goudarzi
Political prisoner: 1982- 1988; she spent 6 years in prison.#Iran #ProsecuteRaisiNOW #EndEnforcedDisappearances pic.twitter.com/w2CQL3X7ZM— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 26, 2021
The regime has a long history of torturing political prisoners, especially MEK members and/or supporters, by imposing extremely difficult conditions and even imposing torture on their loved ones to break the political prisoners’ wills. It was no different for Ms. Goudarzi.
“There were 48-hour periods when I was only able to provide some water and a few sugar cubes for my baby. The solitary confinement section of the prison, I think, had about thirty cells. These cells were usually allocated to prisoners who were tortured for the day. All of these prisoners were sentenced to torture, long-term imprisonments, and execution by Ebrahim Raisi’s orders when he was the prosecutor in the city of Hamedan in western Iran from 1981 to around 1984,” she continued.
As if giving birth in solitary confinement wasn’t already gruesome to bear, the regime’s prison guards literally attack newborns in their sleep. And Raisi would supervise the night raids in prison.
“One of the methods that the regime used to torture prisoners was through torturing their children. It was the middle of the night, about seven prison guards entered my solitary confinement section and began to inspect the cells. My 38-day-old son and I were asleep when the guards entered my cell in a very loud and wild manner. One of the guards grabbed my son in his sleep, lifted him about 50-60cm above the ground and threw him on the ground violently. Then he began to inspect his clothes and tear them off. I began to yell and protest, but no one listened, and they continued their search. My baby boy was extremely terrified and screaming. At the door of my cell, Ebrahim Raisi, accompanied by Mohammad Salimi, a religious official, was witnessing and observing the night raid,” Ms. Goudarzi added.
“I witnessed much of Ebrahim Raisi’s crimes in Hamedan prison. Several MEK supporters were arrested in 1980-1981, charged with ‘supporting the MEK.’ Their sentencing sessions lasted about seven or eight minutes. All of them, with no exception, were sentenced to death and hanged. Several of them were hanged by a crane located in prison courtyard,” she continued.
Ms. Goudarzi explains how Raisi was directly involved in sending political prisoners to their deaths and very few survived the massacre to provide their accounts today.
“As I said, I was in prison at the time of the 1988 massacre. Prior to this, I was sentenced to death twice in 1983 in a court headed by Ebrahim Raisi. However, due to the intervention of a delegation from Ayatollah Montazeri in Hamadan prison, my death sentences were both overturned, and I was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I was serving my sentence like other prisoners. My brother Parviz Goodarzi was also serving his prison term… The prison warden once told my brother that he would never see freedom again. It seemed there was a plan for the prisoners that nobody knew about,” she explained.
The mullahs’ regime intended to eradicate all political prisoners showing any loyalty and affiliation with the MEK in completely secrecy and as quickly as possible. One can say the entire regime was literally mobilized for this very cause.
“It was around July 29 that all prison visits were cut off. The radio and TV were removed from the prison. No one was allowed to take an outdoor break. The ward was closed off. We were only eight women prisoners in the women’s ward at the time, but there were many more male prisoners. A committee was dispatched to Hamadan prison from Tehran’s Evin prison. The interrogations started on August 1 in Hamadan prison, lasting for almost two weeks. However, the executions in Hamadan prison began on August 4, when the first martyrs, including my own brother Parviz Goodarzi, along with Masoumeh Mirzaei, Zahra Sharifi, and Arjang Ramaghi were hanged on Thursday, August 4, 1988. The executions in Hamadan prison took about one week, from August 4 to August 11th or 12th. Those executed during this period in Hamadan prison were all MEK supporters. They, in fact, were all massacred. All the prisoners had all been tried before; they were all arrested during 1981 – 1982 and had sentence terms. Some had already finished their sentences but had not been released. Masoumeh Mirzaei, for example, had finished serving her prison term one year prior to that date but was still held in prison. It was definitely a massacre,” Ms. Goudarzi continues.
The regime’s intent to annihilate the MEK is vivid through the fact that many MEK supporters who had served their unjust prison terms were maintained behind bars in order to be hanged during the 1988 massacre. Even some who were released just months before the massacre began were rounded up, returned to prison, and sent to the gallows. Many of those few who survived were by mere chance.
“Several MEK members, including Massoud Asgari from the city of Aligudarz, and Nasser Rabiee from Boroujerd, had less than a month to their term would be finished. They were never released, of course. Javad Torabi, who was released about six or seven months prior to the massacre, was arrested again, brought back to prison, tried and sentenced again. I must emphasize that all the prisoners whose trials were held between 1981 – 1984 were sentenced in courts with Ebrahim Raisi as the prosecutor. All these prisoners were sentenced by Raisi, even those who were still serving their sentences, and were executed in August 1988. As far as I know, about 50 supporters of the MEK were executed at this time, and I must say that I was the only one who survived the death sentence,” Ms. Goudarzi says.
The families of Iran’s political prisoners have also suffered alongside their jailed loved ones. Many have even lost their lives after receiving news of their tragic fates. This is yet another method used by the mullahs’ regime to torment the Iranian people into forgoing any thought of dissent.
“I have to say something about the families of those who were executed. These families were also executed emotionally alongside their loved ones, many parents dying in the first days after hearing the news. Some passed away a few months later, including the parents of martyrs Mahmoud Mahmoudi, Javad Torabi and Arjang Ramaghi. These parents, I remember, had strokes within the first months or years of hearing about their loved ones. There were several other parents who suffered from mental disorders a short while later, including the mother of Hadi Hadian from Nahavand city,” Ms. Goudarzi continued.
The effort to bring to justice all perpetrators of Iran’s 1988 massacre continue to this day. As the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said famously, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
“… as one of the survivors of those years and as one of the families of the martyrs of the massacre, I will never forget nor forgive this crime against humanity. We call on the United Nations and the international community to recognize the 1988 massacre as a crime against humanity and bring the perpetrators of this unimaginable crime to justice,” Ms. Goudarzi concluded.
