Opinion

Ebrahim Raisi or when a criminal wants to join the ranks of human rights defenders at the UN

photo_camera Ebrahim Raisi

"Without a series of coincidences, I would surely have been one of the 30,000 victims of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran". These are the words of Mostafa Naderi, a former political prisoner who miraculously escaped the 1988 massacre. As President Ebrahim Raisi officially expresses his desire to join the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Mostafa Naderi looks back on this dark chapter in Iran's modern history and the involvement of the current president of the Islamic Republic in the death commissions.  

Imprisoned and tortured for 11 years

"In 1981, my political dissent and human rights activities landed me in an Iranian prison. I was 17 years old when I was arrested for supporting the People's Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) and selling its publication. Seven years later, after I lost consciousness while being flogged until I was bleeding on the soles of my feet, I was transferred to the prison hospital. When I regained consciousness, another prisoner told me that the authorities had called my name several times. "Who was looking for me," I asked myself. I didn't immediately understand what was going on. 

"But shortly afterwards I learned that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa ordering the massacre of political prisoners, especially supporters of the MEK (Moyahedin-e Khalq, the People's Mujahedin Organisation of Iran). All the occupants of the 60 cells had been executed. No one was spared, no one. To implement Khomeini's fatwa, death squads were selected in all provinces and cities to kill prisoners who were "true to their convictions", i.e. those who based their opposition to the Iranian regime on freedoms and made no secret of their affiliation to the PMOI. Ebrahim Raisi was then the prosecutor of Hamadan. He was an active member of these death commissions. 

Raisi is ashamed to call himself a defender of human rights

"Now, as president, he wants to participate in the UN General Assembly and wants to defend human rights in Iran. In an interview quoted by the Deutsche Welle (DW) website, he said of the 1988 executions that their action was to be praised and appreciated. He also told the pro-regime newspaper Donya-e-Eqtesad: "I am a man of law and a defender of human rights. I am proud to have defended people's rights through my responsibilities in the judiciary when I was a prosecutor". 

"In 1988, the ayatollahs turned Iran's prisons into slaughterhouses. Prisoners were rounded up and hanged, six at a time. At night, the bodies were transferred to mass graves in meat trucks. The prison authorities acted with such ruthless efficiency that on some nights up to 400 people were executed. In all, some 30,000 prisoners were massacred in the space of a few months. As I had been hospitalised, my name was not remembered, and I became one of the 250 or so political prisoners who survived Evin's death squad. 

The struggle for truth 

"When I was released in 1991, I worked hard to determine the true extent of the 1988 massacre. I had to flee the country to continue alerting the world to this event. Then a document turned the struggle for the truth on its head: the revelation, on 9 August 2016, of an audio recording of Ayatollah Khomeini's former heir apparent, Hosein Ali Montazeri, in which he is heard berating members of Tehran's amnesty committee for their involvement in what he calls the "greatest crime of the Islamic Republic", details some of the most grisly aspects of the massacre, such as the executions of pregnant women and teenage girls, and the targeting of people whose support for the MEK was limited to reading its newspapers and magazines." 

"Today, human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, describe the massacre as a crime against humanity with impunity. According to Geoffrey Robertson, a former judge of the UN Special Court, the 1988 bloodbath was the largest mass execution of prisoners since World War II. Yet there has never been an international investigation. Worse still, the masterminds and perpetrators of this heinous crime now occupy high positions of responsibility within the state". 

Ebrahim Raisi is the best example of this impunity.

Hamid Enayat is a political scientist specialised in Iran.