Amnesty International: Iranian authorities' systematic cover-up of 1988 executions continues

Amnesty International said in a statement on Tuesday, September 25, on the occasion of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, that Iranian authorities and officials continue to systematically cover up the execution of thousands of political prisoners during secret and extrajudicial executions in 1988.

In this statement, Amnesty International emphasized on the eve of the "Enforced Disappearances Day" on August 30 or 8th of Shahrivar, that the world has turned a blind eye to the widespread crisis of enforced disappearances in Iran.

Amnesty International stated in its statement: "The executions of thousands of victims across the country have gone unrecorded, and the bodies of thousands of disappeared people are buried in mass graves. More than 30 years later, Iranian authorities continue to deny the existence of such mass graves and fail to identify their locations, causing untold suffering to the families of the victims as they search for traces of their disappeared loved ones."

Philip Luther, Amnesty International's Director of Research and Legal Affairs for the Middle East and North Africa, said: "The families of those whose loved ones were secretly executed in the 1988 prison massacre continue to live in a nightmare."

Philip Luther emphasized: "We should not consider the mass killings of 1988 as a historical event that belongs to the past. The crime of enforced disappearance is still occurring, and 30 years later, the families of the victims are still suffering because the fate and burial place of their loved ones is unknown."

On December 4, 2018, Amnesty International published a 200-page report containing documents and evidence from the 1988 executions, calling on the United Nations to conduct a comprehensive and independent investigation into the extent of these executions. The human rights organization says the 1988 executions constitute a “crime against humanity” because, according to Amnesty International, these executions were carried out “extrajudicially, without a fair and legal trial” based on a fatwa issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the then leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Due to the cover-up by the Islamic Republic authorities, there are no exact statistics on the number of those executed, but according to some estimates, in the summer of 1988, around five thousand political prisoners who were supporters of the People's Mojahedin Organization and leftist groups such as the Fedayeen Khalq and the Tudeh Party were executed in Iranian prisons. 

The burial locations of most of the executed are unknown, but in recent years, the destruction of some mass graves from the 1988 executions in a number of Iranian cities has been reported in the media.

In 2016, an audio file was released of a meeting and conversation between Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the ousted successor to the founder of the Islamic Republic, and Hossein Ali Nayiri, the then-Islamic ruler, Morteza Eshraqi, the then-prosecutor of Tehran, and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the then-representative of the Ministry of Intelligence, in Evin Prison.

In this conversation, Ayatollah Montazeri refers to the mass killing of political prisoners as a crime. These three people, along with Ebrahim Raisi, were among the decision-makers on the 1967 executions, known as the "Death Commission."

Source: Radio Farda