Gesinne van vermoorde gevangenes betoog in Iran na internasionale oproepe tot aksie

On Thursday (13 May), a group of Iranian activists gathered at a cemetery in Tehran to seek renewed attention to a more than thirty-year-old crime against humanity for which no one has been held accountable to date. The protest was led by the families of persons who were killed during the massacre of Iranian political prisoners in the summer of 1988. Its location was selected on the basis of recent reports that a pending development project will may destroy a section of Khavaran Cemetery that is believed to include a mass grave where many of the victims of that massacre were secretly buried. The 1988 massacre has once come under scrutiny since one of its main culprits has become a main candidate in the upcoming presidential election in Iran scheduled for 18 June.

The Iranian authorities have attempted to cover up evidence regarding the scale of the 1988 massacre. Persons who are familiar with the incident have estimated that the overall death toll was around 30,000, mainly activists of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), the main Iranian opposition movement.  The identities and final resting places may never be known for some of these victims, as the Iranian regime has already completed plans at other sites much like those which are now pending in Khavaran. The activists involved in the Thursday gathering were relatives of the MEK victims in the 1988 massacre.

Roughly two weeks prior to Thursday’s gathering, a number of victims’ families wrote a letter to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres in which they noted that the regime has “destroyed or damaged the mass graves of the 1988 victims in Ahvaz, Tabriz, Mashhad, and elsewhere.”

In their latest public demonstration, the families carried signs with messages that described Khavaran as “the enduring document of a crime against humanity” and declared that they “will neither forgive nor forget” the massacre until its perpetrators have been prosecuted or otherwise held accountable. The protesters also identified some of those perpetrators by name, focusing particular attention upon Ebrahim Raisi, whose name was chanted along with the label, “Henchman of 1988.”

Raisi currently serves as the head of Iran’s judiciary, having been appointed to that post by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in 2019. He is also reportedly Khamenei’s favored candidate to replace the outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, a fact which makes his victory in next month’s tightly controlled election a near-certainty. Iran’s Guardian Council has already exercised its authority to bar most so-called reformist candidates from the race, while “hardliners” have overwhelmingly signaled their willingness to drop out and back Raisi’s prospective run.

During his two years as judiciary chief, Raisi has overseen more than 500 executions, as well as countless other instances of corporal punishment including floggings and amputations. His time in that role has coincided with particularly severe crackdowns on dissent, including the shooting deaths of around 1,500 participants in a nationwide uprising in November 2019. Also Raisi would have certainly had authority over the treatment of more roughly 12,000 activists who were imprisoned in the aftermath.

Last September, Amnesty International issued a report titled “Trampling Humanity” which detailed much of the torture that those arrestees were subjected to for months after the uprising. Coincidentally, the report coincided very closely with the delivery of a letter by seven UN human rights experts which called upon Iranian authorities to release all available information about the 1988 massacre and to halt their cover-up and their harassment of survivors and victims’ families.

advertensie

That letter was released to the general public in December after receiving no reply from the authorities to whom it was addressed. Its publication was greeted as a “momentous breakthrough” by Amnesty International on the basis that it acknowledged the responsibility of the international community to investigate and respond to the massacre if Tehran still refuses to do so. Toward that end, the UN experts indicated that an opportunity for such a response was missed in the immediate aftermath of the killings, and that the consequences of that oversight persist to the present day.

“In December 1988, the UN General Assembly passed resolution A/RES/43/137 on the situation of human rights in Iran, which expressed ‘grave concern’ about ‘a renewed wave of executions in the period July-September 1988’ targeting prisoners ‘because of their political convictions’,” the letter noted. “However, the situation was not referred to the Security Council, the UN General Assembly did not follow up on the resolution and the UN Commission on Human Rights did not take any action. The failure of these bodies to act had a devastating impact on the survivors and families as well as on the general situation of human rights in Iran and emboldened Iran to continue to conceal the fate of the victims and to maintain a strategy of deflection and denial that continue to date.”

This deflection and denial is reflected not only in the destruction of gravesites and other evidence, but also in the fact that figures like Ebrahim Raisi have been promoted to increasingly influential positions within the Iranian regime despite – or perhaps because of – their role in the 1988 massacre.

Prior to the start of that massacre, Raisi was serving as deputy public prosecutor in Iran. This led to him being one of four individuals who were tasked with implementing the fatwa that created the legal justification for the killings in the capital. That year, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious edict declaring that anyone still opposing the theocratic system should be considered an enemy of God and therefore subject to summary execution. The fatwa took particular aim at the MEK members of which would soon comprise the overwhelming majority of the massacre’s victims.

As a contributor to Tehran’s 1988 “death commission,” Raisi bears responsibility for a great many of those killings. And far from concealing that legacy in recent years, he has actually embraced it, saying in a June 2, 2020 television interview that MEK members “should not be given a chance” and that “the Imam [Khomeini] said we shouldn't have shown [them] any mercy.”

Advocates for victims of the massacre have framed such public statements as consequences of a climate of impunity that has developed with regard to the 1988 massacre and other human rights abuses. This point was reiterated in a recent letter prepared by the organization Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran (JVMI), which urged the international community to challenge that impunity. The letter, signed by more than 150 legal and human rights experts including 45 former UN officials, said, “We appeal to the UN Human Rights Council to end the culture of impunity that exists in Iran by establishing a Commission of Inquiry into the 1988 mass extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances. We urge High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet to support the establishment of such a Commission.”

The JVMI has also referenced the prospective destruction of the mass grave at Khavaran Cemetery in order to underscore the urgency of its appeal. It has demanded “immediate measures to prevent further destruction of martyrs' graves and the elimination of the traces of crimes which amount to the psychological torture of thousands of bereaved families across Iran.”

In a separate statement, Maryam Rajavi, president -elect of the MEK-led National Council of Resistance of Iran urged the UN Security Council and all UN member states to formally condemn Khomeini's fatwa for the 1988 massacre of political prisoners as genocide and a crime against humanity.

Deel hierdie artikel: