Reporting by PMOI/MEK
Iran, August 26, 2020—The 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly is scheduled to open in New York next month, and the international body is coming under increasing pressure to address certain issues that are not currently on its agenda.
On Saturday, a coalition of Iranian dissident groups held an online conference to elevate the profile of one of these issues.
The virtual conference saw participation from former Iranian political prisoners, families of the regime’s victims, and political supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and its main constituent group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). Many of them condemned what they see as a conspiracy of silence orchestrated by the Iranian regime, with complicity from the international community, to conceal or downplay the worst crime against humanity to take place in the latter half of the 20th century.
The incident in question was a series of mass executions spanning several months in 1988, which reportedly resulted in the deaths of approximately 30,000 political prisoners. Survivors and eyewitnesses in Saturday’s conference noted that in many cases, the executions were preceded by long periods of torture, as well as family harassment. One of those speakers lost four family members to the massacre and alleged that his daughter had been arrested arbitrarily as a means of indirectly punishing him for his own support of the PMOI.
Yahya Shojaee, father of four #1988Massacre victims
Four members of my family were executed during the 1988 massacre. My daughter Nasrin was arrested on charges of supporting the PMOI/MEK. She hadn’t done anything.#NoImpunity4Mullahshttps://t.co/Zrb6GPwII8
— People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) (@Mojahedineng) August 22, 2020
That group certainly comprised the vast majority of the victims in 1988. In fact, the inciting incident behind the massacre was the issuance of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini which declared that those who still opposed the theocratic system were to be considered guilty of “enmity against God” and therefore subject to immediate execution. In response, the judiciary convened “death commissions” in prisons throughout the country and took precise aim at the PMOI, which had long since established itself as the main source of organized opposition to the clerical regime.
The NCRI’s video conference emphasized the fact that the death commissions’ activities often involved asking just one question or two questions. If detainees were accused of being affiliated with the PMOI and either refused to deny it or failed to convince the tribunal otherwise, they were executed. If they were asked, “What is your crime,” and they answered by saying that they’d been sentenced as “Mojahed,” they were executed. This principle applied even when those same inmates had been sentenced to a defined prison term and had served it out before being hauled before the death commissions.
The process was so indiscriminate and so devoid of due process that the victims came to include pregnant women and children as young as 13. This was confirmed just four years ago when Ahmad Montazeri, the son of an ayatollah who had been deemed Khomeini’s successor, leaked an audio recording his father had made at the time of the massacre. In it, Ali Hossein Montazeri condemned the killings and warned that their perpetrators would be remembered to history as criminals. What Montazeri did not realize or did not acknowledge at the time was that while waiting for history’s judgment, those perpetrators would be defended by the entire regime and enjoy great success within it.
Assadollah Nabavi, former political prisoner, eyewitness to #1988Massacre
Families & survivors of the massacre are still experiencing horrors because there is no evidence or documents to show whether their loved ones were executed.#NoImpunity4Mullahshttps://t.co/dpFQQx62zQ
— People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) (@Mojahedineng) August 22, 2020
Whereas Khomeini’s heir-apparent was ousted from the regime and would go on to spend the last years of his life under house arrest, members of the death commission continue to receive enviable political appointments to this day. Among those currently occupying highly influential positions are Ebrahim Raisi, the head of the national judiciary, and Alireza Avaie, the Minister of Justice under so-called moderate President Hassan Rouhani.
This, too, was clearly highlighted in the NCRI’s conference. The regime’s tacit celebration of the massacre’s legacy is a sign that it was part of an ongoing series of crimes. This fact was made unmistakable last November when the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) responded to a nationwide anti-government uprising by firing into crowds that had gathered in various cities, killing more than 1,500 peaceful protesters. Since then, at least a dozen participants in that uprising have been sentenced to death, and prosecutions don’t appear to be anywhere near to being complete.
This fact demonstrates the importance of a discussion at the UN General Assembly of Iran’s domestic situation and human rights abuses. And participants in the NCRI event made it clear that there would be insufficient value in that discussion if it did not include reference to the 1988 massacre.
British Member of Parliament David Jones expressed this view on Saturday when he said that the massacre “not only lays bare the international community’s inexplicable failure to uphold and defend international law enacted to prevent genocides and massacres but also highlights a worrying culture of impunity for serious human rights abusers in Iran.”
British MP @DavidJonesMP
There will be no end to human rights violations if perpetrators are rewarded & promoted based on their atrocities instead of facing prosecution, as it is clearly the case in Iran.#NoImpunity4Mullahs#1988Massacrehttps://t.co/PdjAmsvBqF
— People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) (@Mojahedineng) August 22, 2020
The mullahs have been relying on that impunity for a very long time. They have used it to get away with a wide range of crackdowns on dissent, and to brush aside criticism of their country’s status as the world’s foremost abuser of the death penalty. Iran’s per capita rate is unparalleled, with many of the victims being political prisoners or other persons whose accusations come nowhere near to fulfilling the international standard of being “the most serious crimes.”
The United Nations and its member states could certainly begin imposing sanctions and closing embassies and taking other serious actions in response to Iran’s current human rights abuses, at any time. But now sudden outpouring of concern can be taken very seriously if it stands against the background of more than three decades of silence regarding an extraordinary crime against humanity.
The UN Human Rights Commission will no doubt be adopting another resolution in the upcoming session which condemns Iran’s human rights record. But if that resolution is to have any more power than its many predecessors, it should also endorse the growing appeals for a UN-led inquiry into the 1988 massacre, with the ultimate goal of filing charges against death commission members and other known perpetrators of what many experts have described as a crime against humanity.
It should be underlined that the persecution of political prisoners in #Iran based on their political, religious and/or ethnic belongings is an ongoing crime that must stop and the perpetrators must be brought to justice.#1988Massacrehttps://t.co/gp4ydByvoQ
— People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) (@Mojahedineng) August 22, 2020
