Before talking about the role played by Ebrahim Raisi, the newly elected Iranian president, in the 1988 massacre, and the major violations of human rights that were and are being committed in Iran, I would like to take a cursory look at how the Islamic Republic was established and the fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini according to which this wave of political executions was carried out.
The theorization over the concept of an Islamic government first appeared in lectures that Khomeini gave to his students in Najaf, Iraq, during the 1970s. There, he developed the theory of the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, and entrusted himself with the responsibility of fortifying Islamic rule at home and spreading its principles globally.
To fortify the rule of the Islamic Jurist, since his arrival in Tehran from Paris in 1979, Khomeini established what was known as the Islamic Revolution Committees and the Revolutionary Guards to ensure the tight implementation of the directions of the Supreme Leader.
These forces began to follow Khomeini’s orders and launched a political assassination campaign against any remnants of the Shah’s regime, who fled with his family into exile. Hundreds of army and intelligence officers known as SAVAK, as well as all those suspected of loyalty to the monarchy, were executed. These killings were carried out without trial. After this purge, the second stage of building the Islamic Republic on the basis of a single party (the Islamic Party) began.
Parties opposing the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist theory were banned, opposition activists were imprisoned, and their leaders were assassinated. In the summer of 1988, after Khomeini accepted the United Nations resolution to stop fighting in the war against Iraq, the Supreme Leader issued his famous fatwa, which calls for the extermination of all forces opposed to the Islamic Republic and the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, on the grounds that whoever rejects them is one of the “hypocritical and corrupt warriors on earth” who must be exterminated.
Immediately, arrangements began for the execution of political prisoners, most of whom were imprisoned starting in 1981 on charges that do not carry the death penalty. From this date onward, the 1988 massacre began. Based on Khomeini’s fatwa, committees were established to follow the regime’s orders. One of the members of the death committee in the city of Tehran was a young man in his twenties named Seyyed Ebrahim Rais Al-Sadaty, also known as Mr. Ebrahim Raisi.
Raisi, who would later become president of the Islamic Republic, headed one of the revolutionary courts during the 1988 massacres. He also headed some charitable societies and progressed in the judiciary until he became head of the judicial branch of the Iranian Ministry of Justice.
There are eyewitnesses of political prisoners who survived this campaign and can testify that Raisi took an active role in the killings. In several reports, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also confirmed that Raisi was indeed a member of the death commission in Tehran, and the two organizations called on the international community to hold him accountable for contributing to crimes against humanity, torture and genocide.
Based on these allegations, a group of victims’ families in Europe submitted complaints to the authorities in Europe, including in Britain and Scotland, to arrest Raisi if he dared to travel to attend the international conference on climate change scheduled to take place in the United Kingdom next November. Prosecuting the leaders of the Iranian regime for these crimes would transfer fear from the opposition camp to the mullahs’ camp.
From now on, they cannot travel abroad without taking the necessary precautions to evade arrest and accountability, and diplomatic protection will not satisfy them, given the fact that perpetrators of crimes against humanity, genocide and torture cannot invoke their job position to evade judicial accountability. – Dr. Taher Boumdra (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)
Source » themedialine