01.09.2016
Burying the scandal
The western media has shown little interest in new revelations about the slaughter of political prisoners in 1988, reports Yassamine Mather
On August 10, Ahmad Montazeri, the son of the late ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri (the man who had seemed destined to succeed Ruhollah Khomeini as Iran’s supreme leader), released an audio tape of his father’s comments to Islamic judicial authorities, who were responsible for the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.
On the 28-year-old recording Montazeri is heard saying:
You [Islamic judiciary officials] will in the future be criminals. The greatest crime committed under the Islamic Republic, from the beginning of the revolution until now, which will be condemned by history, is this crime [of mass executions] committed by you … Believe me, I haven’t been able to sleep and this issue occupies my mind two-three hours every night … how will you respond to the families? How many did the shah execute? Compare our executions to his!
So, now, without [the prisoners] having carried out any new activities, we go and execute them. This means that all of us screwed up, our entire judicial system is wrong. Isn’t that what it means? We are among ourselves here. I mean, we want to take stock …
This one guy, his brother was in prison. Eventually when, you know, he got caught up in this, they said his sister was also a suspect. So they went and brought in the sister. They executed the guy. The sister - it was only two days since they had brought her in - when they told her [of her brother’s death], she said, ‘I liked these people.’ They said the sister was 15 or 16 years old. They said, now that her brother has been executed, and after what she said, execute her too - and they did.
In Esfahan, a pregnant woman was among [those massacred] …. [In clerical jurisprudence] one must not execute a woman even if she is a mohareb [enemy of god]. I reminded [Khomeini] of this, but he said they must be executed. In the month of Moharram, at least in the month of Moharram, the month of god and the prophet, it shouldn’t be like this. At least feel some shame before Imam Hussein. Cutting off all meetings and suddenly engaging in such butchery, dragging them out and bang, bang! Does this happen anywhere else in the world?1
Montazeri’s final comment are about the reputation of both the Islamic regime and ayatollah Khomeini himself:
Beware of 50 years from now, when people will pass judgment on the leader and will say he was a bloodthirsty, brutal and murderous leader …. I do not want history to remember him like that …. What if I die before ayatollah Khomeini? I might not be able to go to heaven if I don’t raise my concerns about these executions.
Following these statements, Montazeri was dismissed from his position as Khomeini’s heir-apparent and a year later this theologian, known as a marjae taghlid (high cleric to be followed), was replaced by a junior cleric - Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current supreme leader.
The tape was the subject of a BBC Persian discussion on August 18.2 The anchor reminded us that many of the individuals addressed by ayatollah Montazeri held important positions in the current Rowhani administration - amongst them Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, who was at the time representing the ministry of intelligence and who is currently the ‘reformist’ government’s minister of justice. Ebrahim Raeisi, who at the time was an Islamic prosecutor, is nowadays in charge of one the largest vaghfs (a religious endowment in Islamic law) as head of Astan Quds Razavi (Mashad Shrine of the 8th Shia Imam Reza), which has a revenue estimated at billions of dollars.3
Montazeri is also heard addressing Khomeini’s son, Ahmed, over his role in the executions.
Trapped into confessing
The mass killing of political prisoners in the Islamic Republic of Iran lasted five months. Some of those killed were members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran. However, many were supporters of distinctly leftwing organisations, including the Fedayeen, Peykar, Rahe Kargar and Vahdat Communisti. Many of the prisoners had already served the sentences issued at the time of their arrest, yet they faced further charges completely unrelated to their original sentence. They were interviewed by commissions using a set list of questions to see if they qualified as ‘heretics’ or those who ‘waged war on god’. Some of the victims were executed after they gave ‘unsatisfactory’ answers to the following and similar questions in a ‘trial’ that lasted just a few minutes:
Are you a Muslim? Is the holy Qur’an the word of Allah? Do you believe in heaven and hell? Will you publicly recant historical materialism? Will you denounce your former beliefs before the cameras? Would you rather share a cell with a Muslim or a non-Muslim? When you were growing up, did your father pray, fast and read the holy Qur’an? ...
Prison guards and prosecutors told the prisoners that these questions were asked for practical purposes - to separate practising Muslims from non-practising ones. However, the real reason was clear - to identify leftwing prisoners who remained atheist, so that they could be labelled apostates, in which case they would face the firing squad. At some stage in late August to September 1988 there developed a general awareness of the purpose of these questions and some lives were saved when leftwing prisoners decided to lie. But by then hundreds had already been killed.
As I said in the BBC programme, although it is important to realise the importance of the tapes as the only official admission of culpability by a very senior member of the Iranian clergy - and Montazeri clearly played a significant role in this respect, losing his position at the top of the hierarchy as a result - we should not forget that his main concern was not slaughter of innocent prisoners in and of itself, but the reputation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not to mention his own chances of going to heaven if he failed to protest.
The revelations in the tape and subsequent programmes, including the BBC documentary, continue to draw headlines in the Iranian press and media.
Conservative-‘reformist’ MP Ali Motahari, deputy head of Iranian majles (parliament), is one of the few politicians calling for an investigation into the slaughter. The maverick MP may be doing this for specific political reasons (some say he intends to stand as a presidential candidate next year or in five years time). However, his remains a lone voice even amongst reformist allies of Rowhani. Twenty MPs have signed a letter calling for his resignation.
In the meantime, other so-called ‘reformists’ are keeping quiet. Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the leader of the Green movement in 2009, was prime minister in the year following the executions - the second highest-ranked man in the Islamic Republic after Ayatollah Khomeini, as Iran had no president at that time. His silence on the subject, together with the attempts of his supporters to bury the story, speaks volumes.
As for Pour-Mohammadi, he told Tasnim Press on August 28 that he was “proud” of his role in the executions and had certainly not lost any sleep over the issue. Others have declared that Khomeini’s decision to issue a fatwa against defenceless political prisoners was “totally justified”. For his part, ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani said: “… the evil aims pursued by our enemies is to trash the image of Ahmad Khomeini and his father and, of course, this should not be allowed.” Yet Khomeini’s only son remains a hero of the ‘reformist’ faction of the Islamic republic. One of the former supreme leader’s grandsons, Hassan Khomeini, went one step further: “What is the point of repeating baseless lies spread by our enemies?” he asked.
Of course, the wiser members of the Rowhani administration are well aware that admitting to or supporting the mass killing of political prisoners can have repercussions in terms of international law. Their comments are often restricted to a more general defence of ayatollah Khomeini, whom many regard as an imam, whose actions should be defended in their totality.
Another tribunal?
So what can be done and how should we deal with the revelations? First of all, it is interesting to note that the western media has shown little or no interest in an issue that has dominated Iranian news for the last three weeks. Why? The answer is clear: following the nuclear agreement of 2015, Iran is no longer ‘the main enemy’. The US and European countries are competing for economic deals with Iran, so who cares about leftwing prisoners being executed 28 years ago? Ironically the latest spat about the Montazeri tapes coincided with French environment minister Ségolène Royal’s visit to Iran. Ms Royal, wearing the obligatory headscarf, was seen smiling next to Masoumeh Ebtekar, her counterpart in Iran, on the very day that relatives of those killed in the 1980s, gathered in Khavaran cemetery to commemorate the death of their loved ones.
The only country showing any interest in the story is Saudi Arabia, the main backer of the outlawed People’s Mojahedin of Iran (no longer considered a serious political organisation - these days it looks more and more like a dodgy cult). However, Riyadh’s own human rights records is so abysmal, it is unlikely anyone will pay much attention to the propaganda dished out by media outlets controlled by the Saudis.
Of course, one should not have any illusions in attempts to revive the kind of sham ‘tribunal’ we witnessed in 2012. The tribunal, supported by many in the exiled Iranian left, was paid for by the US National Endowment for Democracy. The victims of the executions, as well as all the other comrades who lost their lives in the brutal repression imposed by the Islamic Republic throughout the 1980s, deserve better. As I keep telling Iranian comrades, it is as if the anti-war movement in Britain accepted funds from Vladimir Putin (or Khamenei!) for a trial of Tony Blair and his ministers. Such a tribunal would be completely worthless - as in 2012, the culpability of the organisers would render its findings worthless.
Yet the issue of the executions of political prisoners in the 1980s cannot be forgotten - even now we do not know what is happening in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. Yes, the number of political prisoners is much smaller, but only a month ago an unknown number of political prisoners, including sympathisers of Kurdish groups, were executed in Iranian prisons.
The issue is also important in terms of the broader politics of Iran. Every four years Iranians face a choice in the election to the second most important post in the country - that of the president - and each time they inevitably choose a ‘reformist’ candidate in the hope that the new man will change things for the better. Yet we now know that many of these ‘reformists’ played an active role in the repression and terror of the 1980s and do not regret their past - their new found ‘liberalism’ is more to do with appearance than substance, and maybe it is time to stop choosing between ‘bad’ and ‘worse’.
The supporters of the ‘reformist’ movement in the ranks of sections of the discredited left, such as the Fedayeen Majority, who have consistently supported one or other faction of the regime, tell us the executions had nothing to do with Khomeini and his allies: they were an inevitable consequence of the violence embodied not just by the regime, but also its opponents on the left, who after the defeat of the February 1979 uprising did not rally to support Khomeini. Those who opposed his regime, those who were executed in the early 1980s, those who were forced to take refuge in Kurdistan in order to resist the regime’s repression - apparently they are equally responsible for the executions. The message is clear: revolutionary change equals violence and the ‘reasonable’ solution is to accept reform à la Rowhani. Revolution can only mean more violence.
However, anyone with any sense of history knows that state violence is an integral part of a ruling class maintaining its grip on power. The responsibility for such violence in a revolutionary situation lies entirely at the door of Iran’s brutal Islamic regime.
yassamine.mather@weeklyworker.co.uk
Notes
1. www.bbc.com/persian/iran/2016/08/160810_ahmad_montazeri_1367_file.
2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7R12DzZT8
&list=PLmdEvtplre60AYdxq_0nSuP77d4xBa2
1m&index=1.
3. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebrahim_Raeesi.