The summerof Blood: A Tribute to the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran

Per Secret documents smuggled out of Iran, over 30,000 political prisoners as young as 13 were hanged from cranes or shot to death in groups of five or six at a time. A few weeks before that massacre, without any warning, Iran’s prison authorities suspended all family visits, televisions and radios were removed from the wards, delivery of newspapers was cancelled, and prisoners were not allowed to exercise or visit the prison’s clinic.

In June 1981, by the invite of Masoud Rajavi, the Mojahedin-e-Khalgh (PMOI) leader, thousands of people came out to the streets of Tehran and other major cities of Iran and held a peaceful and non-violent demonstration against Khomeini’s oppressive and dictatorial rulings. Majority of those demonstrators were made of young men and women, and many were even under the age of eighteen. By the direct order (Fatwa/religious decree) of Khomeini, his fascist Revolutionary Guards and Militia Supporters cracked down people’s peaceful demonstration. In the day of the anti-Khomeini rally, a lot of people, including young women and children were being arrested and transported to the regime’s prisons, where they became subjected to torture and execution. The 30,000 political prisoners who were savagely executed by the direct order of Khomeini in 1988 were, in fact, the survivors of the 1981 massacre.

Khomeini’s regime’ main reasons for the mass killing of Iran’s political prisoners were as following: First, the political prisoners completely opposed Khomeini’s undemocratic and inhumane ideas and refused to acknowledge his Velayat-e-Faghih totalitarian system. Second, they did not endorse Khomeini as their true leader or the leader of anti-monarchism revolution. Third, the political prisoners were strongly maintaining their beliefs regarding “true” freedom and democracy, ideas, which Khomeini utilized previously to deceive people with and hijack their historical revolution. Forth, by murdering 30,000 of its supporters, Khomeini attempted to get revenge from the PMOI for the military defeat, which his regime received from the group in western Iran in 1988. 

According to Amnesty Internationals “Shortly afterwards (referring to the secret interrogations), hundreds of political prisoners were taken, one by one, to a special room, where they were interrogated in special summary “re-trials” Many thought they were going to be pardoned and released – as most were about to complete their sentences. Instead, they were executed.”

Kamal Af’khami who worked at Evin Prison testified at the United Nations that every half an hour from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm, 33 people were lifted on three forklift trucks to six cranes, each of which had five or six ropes. He said: "The process went on and on without interruption." In two weeks, 8,000 people were hanged. Similar carnage took place across the country.
Khomeini thought that by the extermination of the supporters of the PMOI, its main opposition group, which consisted of various Iranian cultural and ethnic groups, he could suffocate the voices of people for freedom and democracy. Khomeini, however, was absolutely wrong! Many thousand men and women have continued to follow the path of those 30,000 massacred prisoners since 1988. Many have been martyred through the regime’s terrorist attacks and bombardments of Camp Ashraf and Liberty in Iraq, some are still under torture in the notorious prisons in Iran, and many thousands including a lot of decedents and survivors of the 1988 massacre are currently fighting to overthrow Khomeini’s tyrannical regime.

28 years have passed since the systematic massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in Iran and this mass killing has still not been recognized as a genocide or crime against humanity by the United Nations. A lot of the regime’s officials who were involved with the 1998 massacre are still alive and some have even held high-ranking positions including Mohammed Khatami who served as the regime’s fifth president from 1997 to 2005 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the sixth president from 2005 to 2013. Khatami was the director of Ideological and Cultural Affairs and Ahmadinejad was a regime’s militia supporter and a tormentor and interrogator of political prisoners in 1980’s.   

The people of Iran want justice and they expect the United Nations and the international society to recognize the 1988 massacre of the political prisoners as a crime against humanity. The people of Iran and the descendants of the mass massacre also want the United Nations to hold tribunals for those who were involved with the mass killing and condemn them of crime against humanity. The same way that the members of the Nazi Party and former Bosnian Serb leaders were convicted of genocide, the members of Mullahs’ fascist regime must be convicted of crimes against humanity in an International tribunal.