US Congress resolution slams Iran atrocity

A resolution recently introduced in the US House of Representatives condemned an atrocity that most Americans, indeed most Westerners, have never heard of: The 1988 killings of approximately 30,000 political prisoners in Iran.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle chose to try to right that wrong by introducing Resolution 188, which deplores the murder of victims who “included thousands of people, including teenagers and pregnant women, imprisoned merely for participating in peaceful street protests and for possessing political reading material, many of whom had already served or were currently serving prison sentences.”
The massacre was carried out in such a way that word spread throughout Iran, terrorizing the populace and paralyzing thousands of families, neighborhoods and communities with grief. The cruelty was extreme. As the resolution noted, “the families of the executed were denied information about their loved ones and were prohibited from mourning them in public.” But the outside world was kept pretty much in the dark, or when confronted with flashes of reality, many chose to close their eyes.
Amnesty International said the vast majority of the executed were affiliated with the main opposition People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The House resolution noted that prisoners were “brought before the commissions and briefly questioned about their political affiliation, and any prisoner who refused to renounce his or her affiliation with groups perceived as enemies by the regime was then taken away for execution.”
The lawmakers were pushed to act in part by the shameless audacity of the government of recently re-elected President Hassan Rouhani, who appointed as his justice minister one of the detested members of Tehran’s “death commission,” Mostafa Pourmohammadi.
Even more galling, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s pick to succeed Rouhani in last month’s presidential elections, Ebrahim Raisi, had already been rewarded for his long years of allegiance by being named custodian of the Astan Quds Razavi foundation, the wealthiest charity in the Muslim world.
Charity here is a relative term. Under the mullahs, the mega-millions all end up in the coffers of the supreme leader to fund Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its terrorist, fundamentalist agenda.
Khamenei sought to manipulate the election, and thereby shore up his wretched regime, by imposing Raisi on Iran’s unwilling people as their president. He did not calculate that the campaign rivalry between the self-described “moderate” incumbent and his “hard-liner” rival would bring the 1988 massacre to the surface, prompting public outrage so extreme that even powerful mullahs within Khamenei’s faction distanced themselves from Raisi.
Khamenei backed down — a big loss for him, but not a big change for Iran’s people. Rouhani, also a veteran of the bloodthirsty regime, got another term that will likely differ little from his first four years, which saw more than 3,000 executions, an intense crackdown, rampant poverty, domestic injustice, escalating foreign meddling, skyrocketing military and security budgets, and a drive to advance the regime’s ballistic missile project.
But it was a rude awakening to the ruling mullahs of how their past crimes against humanity can come back to haunt them. In light of how deeply Iranians reacted to the re-emergence of the 1988 massacre, overturning efforts at the highest level to engineer the “election,” Resolution 188 — condemning the massacre and calling for justice for the victims — is timely and right.
Fearful of the spread of the campaign for justice, the authorities have begun desecrating the unmarked mass graves of those executed in different cities. On June 1, Amnesty International expressed alarm, saying: “The desecration of a mass grave site in Ahvaz, southern Iran, that contains the remains of at least 44 people who were extrajudicially executed would destroy vital forensic evidence and scupper opportunities for justice for the mass prisoner killings that took place across the country in 1988.”
The legislators cited in their resolution an Amnesty report, concluding: “There should be no impunity for human rights violations, no matter where or when they took place. The 1988 executions should be subject to an independent impartial investigation, and all those responsible should be brought to justice, and receive appropriate penalties.” I second that.