Iran: That Horrible Year, 1988 + video

Irans Death Commissions exposed 30,000 massacred after Khomeinis fatwa

By: Gholam-Hossein Vakilzadeh

Le Courier,  21 August 2017--  During the summer of 1988, more than 30,000 political prisoners were executed in Ayatollah Khomeini’s jails. A 'movement for justice' is campaigning for the leaders of the religious dictatorship to face justice.

They are definitely the stars of Iranian politics. Not quite in their forties, they are still young. Neither the current government nor the opposition has managed to distance themselves from the 1980s, which were 'crucial' to the Islamic Republic, as the Supreme Leader of the Theocracy, Ali Khamenei, says today. What was so 'crucial' to them? Why did they come back with such a punch in Iranian news? Why is the population so attached to them?

In its latest report on Iran, published on 2 August, Amnesty International explains that 'human rights defenders seek the truth, justice, and compensation for thousands of prisoners who were summarily executed or were killed by force during the 1980s and those who have to face new kinds of reprisals on the part of the authorities. This includes relatives of the victims, who have become human rights defenders out of necessity, and young human rights activists who have taken to social media and other platforms to discuss atrocities committed in the past.The new crackdown has rekindled appeals for an investigation into the killing of several thousand political prisoners in a wave of extrajudicial executions in the country during the summer of 1988.'(ibid)

Let us return to those early years of the Islamic Republic. Barely two years after the fall of the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini who, on his arrival in Paris in 1978, had sworn in an interview given to the newspaper Le Monde (L. George, Le Monde, 6 May 1978) to withdraw from power to continue his studies in Qom, is now unrecognizable. On his return to Iran in February 1979, he quickly forgot about his theological studies and a few months later, removed his too liberal Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. He started to rule the country with an iron hand. The first disagreements happened when he imposed in the Constitution the principle of the Velayat Faghih, the absolute power of a religious guide. He had already undergone two bloody repressions by Kurdish and Turkmen minorities. As for women, the agenda can be summarized as 'a blow or veil on the head' and removing them from many administrations and key posts. The first legislative and presidential elections in the spring of 1980 were undermined by widespread fraud that left no room for opposition (not one seat in the Assembly). As for foreign policy, it had already resulted in two big booms: the hostage taking at the American embassy in Tehran (from 4 November 1979 to 20 January 1981) and the war in Iraq, which began on 22 September 1980, which the Ayatollah considers 'a divine gift' and in which he sent thousands of children to the minefields.