Ebrahim Raisi, now President-elect of Iran, speaks at a rally during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s
The UN Special Rapporteur for Iran, Javaid Rehman, has called for an investigation of the mass killings of prisoners in the 1980s, including current President-elect Ebrahim Raisi’s role.
Rehman said on Monday that his office has gathered evidence and testimonies over the executions of at least 20,000 men and women in Iran during the 1980s. Amnesty International has documented the killing of about 4,500 people, some of them juveniles, in summer 1988 alone.
The Special Rapporteur, expressing concern at reports that some mass graves are being destroyed, said he is ready to share the material with the UN Human Rights Council.
Current judiciary Ebrahim Raisi, the victor of Iran’s managed Presidential election on June 18, was a member of the “death panel” that ordered the mass executions.
Rehman said on Monday, “I think it is time and it’s very important now that Mr. Raisi is the President [-elect] that we start investigating what happened in 1988 and the role of individuals.”
The office of Raisi, who will be inaugurated in early August, could not reached by Reuters for comment. Iranian officials in Geneva and New York did not respond.
The President-elect has previously claimed that he was upholding “human rights” through the orders for the killings: “If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised….I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far.”
Rehman told reporters, “I will campaign for justice to be done.”
He noted that, as the Guardian Council and other Iranian bodies barred almost all candidates and ensured Raisi’s electoral win, “There were arrests, journalists were stopped from asking specific questions about the background of the presidential candidate Mr Raisi and there was intimidation towards any issues that were raised about his previous role and background.”
Also from the report: http://www.unarts.org/H-II/ref/IMReport1988.pdf
“Eshraqi (Raisi’s boss) was, reportedly, the member who intervened favourably on behalf of several prisoners from families descended
from the prophet”
Geoffrey Robertson cannot stick to his own version regarding the events of 1988 in Iran:
He states in the Guardian that, “the prison massacres were ordered by the Ayatollah Khomeini, furious at having to accept a truce in his war with Saddam Hussein.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/30/iran-president-mass-executions-1980s-ebrahim-raisi
But that isn’t what he stated in his report on the subject a decade ago: http://www.unarts.org/H-II/ref/IMReport1988.pdf
“It takes little imagination to understand the fury which must have inflamed the leaders of Iran in the last week of July, not so much at Saddam’s predictable treachery but at the treason of those Iranians who tried to take advantage of it.” (page 40)
Here, he refers to the fact that the reason for retrying MEK prisoners for treason was the failed invasion they undertook, with the support of Saddam Hussein, after the ceasefire was announced. He also never names Raisi in his 2011 report for the Abdorraham Boroumand Foundation:
“The task of implementing this decree in Tehran was specifically entrusted to a three-man committee: Hossein Ali Nayyeri, a religious judge (later promoted to Iran’s Deputy Chief Justice), Morteza Eshraqi, the city’s chief prosecutor (now a Supreme Court Judge), and a representative from the Intelligence Ministry, a role usually taken by Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the Deputy Minister of Intelligence (later Interior Affairs Minister in Ahmadinejad’s first Cabinet).”
“
Varharan,
There’s no contradiction in Robertson’s statement: there could be anger *both* at having to accept the truce and at Iranians blamed for it — indeed, one reinforces the other.
As for Raisi, Robertson makes clear that as deputy prosecutor, he filled the position on the death panel when Eshraqi was absent.
S.
Er….he mentions two completely different things:
In the report he published, he gives the reason for the alleged executions as being the invasion of the MEK ***AFTER*** the truce was agreed.
In his nonsense article in the Guardians, he gives the reason as being Khomeini accepting the truce itself. He never mentions the Iraqi-backed MEK invasion which was seen in Tehran as an act of treason making all MEK members effectively traitors.
Raisi is not named on any document as being involved in the process and Robertson fails to provide even one piece of evidence.
Varharan,
Again, your deliberate misread/distortion: Robertson is clear in both accounts about a combination of motives for the execution, e.g. Khomeini’s anger at having to accept the truce *and* the MEK invasion.
And you seem to be ignorant of the role of Raisi, acknowledged by Iranian officials themselves, on the death panel.
As such, we can pin this.
S.
“It shows that certain authorities have lied about what happened during khamenei’s reign and why it is never a bad thing to question the official narrative.”
And yet, people get sentenced to death for posing such a question in the mullah state.
https://www.radiofarda.com/a/31333694.html
“That has no bearing on the documentation of the 6 million deaths. I presume that you are not moving into Holocaust denial.”
It shows that certain authorities have lied about what happened during WW2 and why it is never a bad thing to question the official narrative.
Varharan,
I’m not referring to the Polish claim, which those who have documented the Holocaust have highlighted as exaggerated.
If you are using this to deny the Holocaust….
S.
Voters Send A Message To Iran’s Leaders After Dismal Turnout For Presidential Election
https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-turnout-message-leaders/31320904.html
“…A Quasi-Referendum
“The real winner has been the boycott campaign that wanted to strip the Islamic republic of its ability to leverage voter turnout as proof of its legitimacy, especially to the outside world,” Fathollah-Nejad added. “What it got instead is a quasi-referendum against it.”…”
Oh, we are back to “it wasn’t six million” argument.
Funny you mention that. The Polish government lied for decades claiming 3 million Catholics were killed at Auschwitz: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-05-07-9202100662-story.html
“Jewish and Polish scholars of the Holocaust now agree that the Auschwitz death toll was less than half the four million cited here for four decades. The actual number was probably between 1.1 million and 1.5 million-and at least 90 percent of the victims were Jews.”
Varharan,
That has no bearing on the documentation of the 6 million deaths. I presume that you are not moving into Holocaust denial.
S.
Interesting timing. Raisi gets elected and now the U.S-appointed Special Rapporteur for Iran wants to have him investigated.
“Amnesty International has documented the killing of about 4,500 people, some of them juveniles, in summer 1989 alone.” The editor of this site mentions Amnesty International’s research (as being gospel truth). But has he actually read their reports?
NO. Amnesty International has “documented” at most several hundred (377) according to their own report (page 168): https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE1394212018ENGLISH.PDF
“The following table lists details related to 377 individual gravestones in Behesht Zahra cemetery in Tehran that Amnesty International was told were attributed by the authorities to the victims of the mass killings of July-September 1988.”
(Incidentally, the existence of individual gravestones undermines Amnesty’s own narrative about mass graves).
Instead, they relied on the MEK/PMOI to provide the list of 4,969 persons allegedly executed. It claimed to access lists compiled by two other sources but these are not independent (page 176 ):
“Amnesty International was aware that the database of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center and the list of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in Iran had drawn information from the PMOI’s list in the case of many of the PMOI victims.”
But the PMOI/MEK had previously released a much smaller list of 1,432 names of not just MEK members executed but some from other armed groups: http://holycrime.com/Images/Listof1367Massacre.pdf
In 1988, the MEK launched three Iraqi-backed invasions of Iran. Thousands of their members were killed in combat or tried and executed upon being captured. The Guardian newspaper relates the last invasion (Operation Eternal Light) which ended in complete disaster:
“We very quickly killed thousands of them,” Mehrad said. “There were piles of bodies on either side of the road. What was interesting to us was that many of them were women.” Some MEK took cyanide rather than be captured alive…..The survivors were tried on the spot and quickly executed; Mehrad watched as hundreds were hanged at gallows erected in the nearby town of Eslamabad.”
Which raises an important question: How many of the 4500/5000 MEK deaths in 1988 were actually those of prisoners executed for treason and how many from combatants? Iran claimed to kill 2000-3000 MEK members in battle and executed another 1,000 escapees. So 70% of the 5000 tally may not have been prisoners.
Yep — your screed somehow missed this passage.
“Amnesty International’s research leaves the organization in no doubt that, during the course of several weeks between late July and early September 1988, thousands of political dissidents were systematically subjected to enforced disappearance in Iranian detention facilities across the country and extrajudicially executed
pursuant to an order issued by the Supreme Leader of Iran and implemented across prisons in the country. Many of those killed were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment in the process.”
The rest of your post is tangential, and indeed irrelevant, to that central finding.