1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners


The 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners was a series of state-sponsored execution of political prisoners across Iran, starting on 19 July 1988 and lasting for approximately five months. The majority of those killed were supporters of the People's Mujahedin of Iran, although supporters of other leftist factions, including the Fedaian and the Tudeh Party of Iran, were executed as well. According to Amnesty International, "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 during this time were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment in the process."
The killings have been described as a political purge without precedent in modern Iranian history, both in terms of scope and coverup. However, the exact number of prisoners executed remains a point of contention. Amnesty International recorded the names of over 4,482 disappeared prisoners during this time, and then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini's deputy, Hussein-Ali Montazeri put the number between 2,800 and 3,800 in his memoirs, but an alternative estimation suggests that the number exceeded 30,000. Because of the large number, prisoners were loaded into forklift trucks in groups of six and hanged from cranes in half-hour intervals.
Ayatollah Montazeri wrote to Ayatollah Khomeini saying "at least order to spare women who have children... the execution of several thousand prisoners in a few days will not reflect positively and will not be mistake-free... A large number of prisoners have been killed under torture by interrogators... in some prisons of the Islamic Republic young girls are being raped... As a result of unruly torture, many prisoners have become deaf or paralysed or afflicted with chronic decease."
Great care was taken to keep the killings undercover, and the government of Iran currently denies their having taken place. Justifications offered for the alleged executions vary, but one of the most common theories advanced is that they were in retaliation for the 1988 attack on the western borders of Iran by the People's Mujahedin of Iran. However, this does not fully account for the targeting of other leftist groups who opposed the Mujahedin invasion.
The killings operated outside legislation and trials were not concerned with establishing the guilt or innocence of defendants. Survivors of the massacre have made various calls for justice and prosecution for the event. Canada has called the event a crime against humanity, and Italy has made similar declarations for justice to be served.

The Massacre

Khomeini's order

Shortly before the executions commenced, Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini issued "a secret but extraordinary order – some suspect a formal fatwa." This set up "Special Commissions with instructions to execute members of People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran as moharebs and leftists as mortads."
In part the letter reads:
Translation :



As the treacherous Monafeqin do not believe in Islam and what they say is out of deception and hypocrisy, and

As their leaders have confessed that they have become renegades, and

As they are waging war on God, and

As they are engaging in classical warfare in the western, the northern and the southern fronts, and

As they are collaborating with the Baathist Party of Iraq and spying for Saddam against our Muslim nation, and

As they are tied to the World Arrogance, and in light of their cowardly blows to the Islamic Republic since its inception,

It is decreed that those who are in prison throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the Monafeqin are waging war on God and are condemned to execution.

Administering of the executions

In Tehran the special commission for the executions had 16 members representing the various authorities of the Islamic government – Imam Khomeini himself, the president, the chief prosecutor, the Revolutionary Tribunals, the Ministries of Justice and Intelligence, and the administration of Evin and Gohar Dasht, the two prisons in the Tehran area from which the prisoner were eliminated. The chair of the commission was Ayatollah Morteza Eshraqi. His two special assistants were Hojatt al-Islam Hossein-Ali Nayyeri and Hojjat al-Islam Ali Mobasheri. The commission shuttled back and forth between Evin and Gohar Dasht prisons by helicopter. In the provinces similar commissions were established, but less is known about them.
Another description of the administration of the executions has it implemented by a "four-man commission, later known as the 'death committee'." Members were Hossein-Ali Nayyeri, Morteza Eshraqi, Ebrahim Raisi and Mostafa Pourmohammadi. Ebrahim Raisi went on to campaign for president of Iran in 2017 as a hard-line conservative where he was criticized for his role in the executions.
Amnesty International identified and analysed evidence that linked several Iranian officials to participating in the massacre. These included Alireza Avayi, Ebrahim Raisi, Mostafa Pour Mohammadi, and others.
The prisoners were not executed without any proceedings, but were "tried" on charges totally unrelated to the charges that had landed them in prison. They were interviewed by commissions with a set list of questions to see if they qualified as moharebs or mortads to the satisfaction of that commission. Many, if not most, of the prisoners were unaware of the true purpose of the questions, although later some were warned by the prison grapevine.
Some of the victims were killed because of their beliefs about religion – because they were atheists or because they were Muslims who followed different versions of Islam.

Isolation of the prisoners

Some scholarly examinations of the massacre argue that the planning stages of the 1988 Massacre began months before the actual executions started. According to one report: "prison officials took the unusual step in late 1987 and early 1988 of re-questioning and separating all political prisoners according to party affiliation and length of sentence." The actual execution process began in the early hours of 19 July 1988 with the isolation of the political prisoners from the outside world. Prison gates were closed, scheduled visits and telephone calls were canceled, letters, care packages, and even vital medicines from the outside were turned away, the main law courts went on an unscheduled vacation. Even relatives of prisoners were forbidden to congregate outside the prison gates.
Inside the prison, cell blocks were isolated from each other and cleared of radios and televisions. Places where prisoners gathered communally, such as lecture halls, workshops, infirmaries, were all closed down and inmates were confined to their cells. Prison guards and workers were ordered not to speak to prisoners. One prisoner constructed a homemade wireless set to listen to the radio news from the outside but found news broadcasters were saying nothing at all about the lockdown.

People's Mujahedin of Iran

The first prisoners to be interviewed or "tried" were the male members of the People's Mujahedin of Iran, including those who had repented of their association with the group. The commission prefaced the proceedings with the false assurance that this was not a trial but a process for initiating a general amnesty and separating the Muslims from the non-Muslims.
It first asked their organisational affiliation; if they replied "Mojahedin", the questioning ended there. If they replied monafeqin, the commission continued with such questions as:
Almost all the prisoners fail to answer in the affirmative to all the questions. These were then taken to another room and ordered to write their last will and testament and to discard any personal belongings such as rings, watches, and spectacles. They were then blindfolded and taken to the gallows where they were hanged in batches of six. Since "hanging" did not mean death by breaking of the neck by drop through a trap door, but stringing up the victim by the neck to suffocate, some took fifteen minutes to die.
After the first few days, the overworked executioners requested firing squads. These requests were rejected on the claim that the Shari'a mandated hanging for apostates and enemies of Allah, though it is thought that the real reason may have been that hanging was quieter than gunfire and would thus better preserve the secrecy of the operations.
At first this secrecy was effective. "One survivor admits that he thought he was being processed to be released in time for the forthcoming peace celebrations."

Dealing with leftists

After 27 August, the commission turned its attention to the leftist prisoners, such as members of the Tudeh, Majority Fedayi, Minority Fedayi, other Fedayi, Kumaleh, Rah-e Kargar, Peykar. These were also assured they were in no danger and asked:
Prisoners were told that authorities were asking them these questions because they planned to separate practicing Muslims from non-practicing ones. However, the real reason was to determine whether the prisoners qualified as apostates from Islam, in which case they would join the moharebs in the gallows.
Some prisoners saved from execution by answering the questions properly returned to their cells and passed along what the commission was asking. A leftist prisoner "who had at one time attended a seminary quickly grasped the theological significance of the questions" and "spent the night of August 30 sending morse code messages to other cells" by knocking on the prison walls. He pointed "out the hidden dangers." The questioners wanted to know if prisoners' fathers prayed, fasted, and read the Qur'an because the sons of devout men could be called apostates. If they had not been raised in proper Muslim homes first and "exposed to true Islam," they could not be apostates. Another wrong answer was refusing to reply "on the grounds of 'privacy'," which "could itself be taken as an admission of 'apostasy'."
All this was a surprise to the prisoners, with one commenting: "In previous years, they wanted us to confess to spying. In 1988, they wanted us to convert to Islam." It also meant there was no correlation between the length of sentence being served and the likelihood of death. "The first leftist to go before the Evin commission were those with light, and even completed, sentences." These had no warning of what was in store and many died.

Dealing with women

Mojahedin women were given equal treatment with Mojahedin men, almost all hanged as 'armed enemies of Allah'. However, for apostasy the punishment for women was different and lighter than that for men. Since according to the commission's interpretation of Islamic law, women were not fully responsible for their actions, "disobedient women – including apostates – could be given discretionary punishments to mend their ways and obey male superiors."
Leftist women—even those raised as practicing Muslims—were given another 'opportunity' to recant their 'apostasy.' "After the investigation, leftist women were all given five lashes for every one of the five daily prayers missed, half the punishment meted out to the men. After a while, many agreed to pray, but some went on hunger strike, refusing even water. One died after 22 days and 550 lashes, and the authorities certified her death as suicide because it was 'she who had made the decision not to pray.'"

Families

According to Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, executed prisoner's families were told: 'For one year you shall refrain from holding a funeral, or mourning his death in any public way. If after one year your conduct is deemed acceptable, we will reveal to you his place of burial.' The justification given to these families for the execution of their loved ones was that the prisoner's name had appeared on notes pinned to PMOI members killed in the Mersad attack whose bodies had been recovered by Iranian Islamic officials. The notes listing the PMOI's supporters' in prison so the prisoners had been guilty of aiding the attack. Ebadi complained that aside from being improbable, this did not explain why the prisoners had not received a trial for the charge of giving support to the enemy. In 2009, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center commissioned Geoffrey Robertson QC to write a legal opinion based on evidence and witness testimonies gathered by the Center. Robertson's final report accused Tehran of continuing to deny relatives of the victims their right to know where their loved ones are buried.

Estimates of fatalities

One anonymous ex-prisoner places the death toll in the 'thousands.' Another eyewitness puts in between 5000 and 6000 – 1000 from the left and the rest from the Mojahedin. Yet another estimates it in the 'thousands', with as many as 1500 killed at Gohar Dasht prison alone. A recent study using scattered information from the provinces places the figure at 12,000. Amnesty International estimates that the national total is more than 2500 and describes the vast majority of the victims as 'prisoners of conscience' as they had not been charged with actual deeds or plans of deeds against the state.
It is extremely difficult to get an accurate number since many killings were carried out in remote Kurdish and Baluchi cities. It could be as high as 30,000 according to figures provided by Iranian defectors. In the aftermath of the 2009 uprisings in Iran, a defector of the Iranian regime Mohammad Nurizad stated over 33,000 people were massacred within 2–3 months in the summer of 1988. It is estimated that most of the executed were either high school or college students or fresh graduates, and over 10% were women. According to Christina Lamb, writing in The Telegraph: "Secret documents smuggled out of Iran reveal that, because of the large numbers of necks to be broken, prisoners were loaded onto forklift trucks in groups of six and hanged from cranes in half-hourly intervals."

International reaction and criticism

On 30 August 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council highlighted the 1988 massacre and distributed a written statement by three non-governmental organizations titled, "The 1988 Massacre of Political Prisoners in Iran: Time for the Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence" The statement points to the following: In 1988, the government of Iran massacred 30,000 political prisoners. The executions took place based on a fatwa by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Three-member commissions known as a 'Death Commission' were formed across Iran sending political prisoners who refused to abandon their beliefs to execution. The victims were buried in secret mass graves. The perpetrators continue to enjoy impunity.
Another joint written statement by five NGOs with consultative status with the United Nations was circulated during the UN Human Rights Council in February 2018 urged "UN to launch fact-finding mission to investigate Iran's 1988 massacre in order to end impunity and prevent the same fate for detained protesters."
On 4 December 2018 Amnesty International asked the government of Iran to bring to light what has happened to the political detainees in the country. Amnesty asked United nations to set up an investigation group to find the facts of crimes against humanity in Iran.
In November 2019, Sweden arrested Hamid Nouri, accused of being an assistant prosecutor during the massacres and playing a key role during the mass executions. UN Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard stated that Nouri's arrest was the first time that someone was held responsible for the mass killings.

Response

Montazeri

One of the consequences of the killings was the resignation of Hussein-Ali Montazeri as the heir-designate to Ayatollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader of Iran.
Prior to the killings, Montazeri "had taken issue with the diehard cleric on a number of subjects – the trial of Mehdi Hashemi, the anti-hoarding campaign..." When he heard of the killings Montazeri rushed off three public letters – two to Khomeini, one to the Special Commission – denouncing the executions "in no uncertain terms." He also took the Special Commission "to task for violating Islam by executing repenters and minor offenders who in a proper court of law would have received a mere reprimand." Montazeri warned Khomeini: "The execution of several thousand prisoners in a few days will not have positive repercussions and will not be mistake-free."
Montazeri was asked to resign, with Khomeini maintaining he had always been doubtful of Montazeri's competence and that 'I expressed reservations when the Assembly of Experts first appointed you.'" But the Assembly of Experts had insisted on naming Montazeri the future Supreme Leader.
The regime published letters between the two Ayatollahs but "the selection dealt only with the Hashemi affair and scrupulously avoided the mass executions – thus observing the official line that these executions never took place."
On 9 August 2016, a website run by followers of Montazeri published an audio recording from a meeting he held on August 15, 1988 with the special judicial tribunal. One can hear Montazeri condemning the mass executions. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security had the recording taken down the day after its release.

Other criticism

One complaint made against the mass killings was that almost all the prisoners executed had been arrested for relatively minor offenses, since those with serious charges had already been executed. The 1988 killings resembled the 'disappearances' of prisoners in 20th-century Latin America.
According to Kaveh Shahrooz, writing in Gozaar, a publication sponsored by Freedom House, "it is baffling that two of the world's most powerful human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have simply never written full reports on a crime as widespread as the 1988 extermination campaign."
While Amnesty International's report "Iran: Violations of Human Rights 1987-1990" published in 1990 devotes a few pages to the massacre, the human rights organization has never written a full report on the killings. The Amnesty International report states:

The political executions took place in many prisons in all parts of Iran, often far from where the armed incursion took place. Most of the executions were of political prisoners, including an unknown number of prisoners of conscience, who had already served a number of years in prison. They could have played no part in the armed incursion, and they were in no position to take part in spying or terrorist activities. Many of the dead had been tried and sentenced to prison terms during the early 1980s, many for non-violent offences such as distributing newspapers and leaflets, taking part in demonstrations or collecting funds for prisoners' families. Many of the dead had been students in their teens or early twenties at the time of their arrest. The majority of those killed were supporters of the PMOI, but hundreds of members and supporters of other political groups, including various factions of the PFOI, the Tudeh Party, the KDPI, Rah-e Kargar and others, were also among the execution victims.

Similarly, Human Rights Watch devotes a mere handful of pages to the massacre in a background report concerning President Ahmadinejad's cabinet picks.
Human Rights Watch has described the executions as "deliberate and systematic... extrajudicial killings," and has condemned them as crimes against humanity. HRW has also accused Mustafa Pour-Mohammadi, Iran's Interior Minister from 2005–2008, of direct involvement in the killings.
UN Judge and leading human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC has urged the UN Security Council to set up a special court, along the lines of the International Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to try the men involved "for one of the worst single human rights atrocities since the Second World War."
On 4 December 2018 Amnesty International asked the government of Iran to bring to light what has happened to the political detainees in the country. Amnesty asked the UN to set up an investigation group to find the facts of crimes against humanity in Iran.

Motivation

A 2018 research by Amnesty International found that Ruhollah Khomeini had ordered the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners through a secret fatwa. In 2016, an audio recording was posted online of a high-level official meeting that took place in August 1988 between Hossein Ali Montazeri and the officials responsible for the mass killings in Tehran. In the recording, Hossein Ali Montazeri is heard saying that the ministry of intelligence used the MEK's armed incursion as a pretext to carry out the mass killings, which "had been under consideration for several years."
Scholars disagree over why the prisoners were killed. Ali Akbar Mahdi believes the intense overcrowding of Iranian prisons and the July 1988 Mojahedin Operation Mersad offensive "had much to do" with the massacre. Ervand Abrahamian believes the "regime's internal dynamics" were responsible – the need for "a glue" to hold "together his disparate followers" and a "bloodbath" to "purge" moderates like Montazeri and prevent any future "détente with the West" from destroying his legacy. In particular the killings destroyed any ties, or possibility of ties, between populists in the Khomeini movement on the one hand, and non-Khomeiniist Islamist and secular leftists on the other. Khomeini had been concerned that "some of his followers had toyed with the dangerous notion of working with the Tudeh Party to incorporate more radical clauses into the Labor Law as well as into the Land Reform Law" earlier.

Iran Tribunal

In 2012 the families of the victims, along with the survivors of the mass executions initiated an international Commission, the Iran Tribunal, in order to investigate the mass killing of Iran's political prisoners. "Iran Tribunal" is aiming to hold Iran's government accountable on charges of crimes against humanity. The first session of court hearing was organized in London and the second one at The Hague Peace Palace.

Iranian Authorities Position

, who was speaking in the administrative council meeting in the city of Khorram-Abad in Lorestan province, on 28 August 2016 said: "We are proud we have implemented God's order about Mojahedin."
The Iran government accused those investigating the killings of "disclosing state secrets" and "threatening national security". According to Amnesty International, there has been an ongoing campaign by the Islamic Republic to demonize victims, distort facts, and repress family survivors and human rights defenders.