The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) has reported that the Romanian human rights organization Şanse Egale Valoare Autoritate (SEVA) has made a call to the United Nations to investigate the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran.
Their statement, published on 28th September, denounced the massacre in which 30,000 political prisoners, many of whom had ties to the People’s Mojahedin (PMOI or MEK), were brutally killed. They called the massacre a “crime against humanity” and said that those responsible for the “worst massacre of political prisoners since World War II” should be punished.
It is also noted in the statement that the revelations about the massacre come just as arbitrary executions are on the rise.
SEVA highlighted that Mostafa Pour Mohammadi, the current Minister of Justice under Rouhani, was on the “death commission” back in 1988. As was the current leader of the Supreme Disciplinary Court for Judges.
In the fatwa Khomeini declared: “As the treacherous Hypocrites [Mojahedin] do not believe in Islam and their statements are rooted in deception and hypocrisy, and as their leaders have confessed that they have become renegades, and as they are waging war on God, … it is decreed that those who are in prison throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the Hypocrites are waging war on God and are condemned to execution.”
Ayatollah Montazeri wrote several letters to Khomeini and the death commission with his disproval of their actions. He warned them that “the massacre of thousands of people in just a few days” would have adverse consequences. He even said that the Mojahedin represent “an idea and a way of thinking,” meaning that “their credibility will be enhanced” by the killings.
They remind that death commissions were formed in Tehran and more than 70 provincial capitals and cities. A former political prisoner in Isfahan’s Dastgerd Prison, confirmed that 10 people were executed nearly every day between August and December 1988. It was then found out that this happened on other prisons too.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues have declared the massacre a crime against humanity.
The full text of the statement can be found on the NCRI’s website.
