I have spent six years in the Iranian regime’s prisons. I was arrested, tortured, imprisoned because of my beliefs.
I was arrested in 1981 while pregnant in Tehran. They took me to the notorious Evin prison in the city’s northern suburbs. I had heard about the place, as during the Shah’s regime, political opponents were imprisoned in Evin, where they underwent torture.
I was transferred outright to a ward called 209. This horrible section in prison was run entirely by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), with total independence from the then Judiciary Corps. It was in ward 209 that I saw my husband, arrested on the same charges as me.
Four people were beating my husband in front of me. They tortured prisoners to extract false confessions necessary for their sentencing.
After that, it was my turn to be beaten with an electric cable. I had experienced nothing more painful and devastating in my whole life. But still, it was better than watching my husband tortured in front of me. That was precisely what they wanted. Because they were torturing him in the first place, and naturally for him, it was more difficult to watch me being beaten.
He was, however, executeda few days later, along with 75 others, before my very eyes. The torturer said to me: “I wanted him never to see his son.”
They took me to the hospital and quickly brought me back to prison even though I was very ill. I kept the child with me in jail. There were no means for keeping children, but many children who had lost a parent were held there. I even witnessed torturers beat a child to make him reveal the name of her mothers’ friends.
After six years,in 1987, I was lucky enough to escape this inferno.
According to Amnesty, authorities are increasingly glorifying the perpetrators of the mass killings as “national heroes” and likened any criticism of the atrocities to support for “terrorism”
One year later, all the women who shared my cell and my section in Evin, roughly 150, were executed.
In the summer of 1988, the regime put thousands of political prisoners to death after a desperate cease-fire agreement to end the 1980-1988 war with Iraq. During those killing months, a three-judge panel retried thousands of inmates already serving sentences. The hearings lasted a few minutes for each prisoner. Those inmates who stood by their opposition to the regime were immediately hanged. In a letter to Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, then the latter’s heir apparent, quoted the number of the executed during a few days to be either 2,800 or 3,800. True counts go as high as 30,000, of which a list of 5000 names has so far been produced. Montazeri stressed that the victims, members of the Moudjahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) organization, were not “individuals,” but “represented a sort of thought.” In other words, those massacred were all prisoners of conscience.
But that is not the worst part. The worst is that those responsible for the carnage were never blamed, nor anyone ever expressed the least sign of regret in the regime. On the contrary, many of the perpetrators of that massacre are still very much in circulation.
The chairman of the three-judge panel, is currently head of the Supreme Disciplinary Court for Judges. He was the judge who condemned my husband, in a few-minute court, to execution. A second influential judge, is currently the head of the Judiciary. The head of the death committee in southern Iran, is the current minister of justice. The head of the executive at the time, is currently the country’s supreme ruler.
I testified in various international hearings on the issue. A sense of bitter frustration always accompanied those testimonies as I felt the massive absence of the will to follow up and persecute those in charge of this crime against humanity. A crime of which every detail is known. Even the location of 56 secret mass graves containing the remains of the executed is known to the public.
Amnesty International published itsin-depth report on the carnage last year. They say Iran is facing a “crisis of impunity” that goes beyond the lack of accountability for the enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions of 1988.
According to Amnesty, authorities are increasingly glorifying the perpetrators of the mass killings as “national heroes” and likened any criticism of the atrocities to support for “terrorism.”
With several cases of crime against humanity brought before international justice, we are no longer in the logic of the 1980s. We can hold perpetrators accountable.
In a month, the UN General Assembly will hold its 75th assembly in New York. The mullahs’ regime has been a constant subject of condemnation by the body forfour decades.
This year is the time to include the 1988 prison massacre in the final UNGA resolution concerning Human rights violations in Iran.
Canada is in charge of preparing the draft resolution. Explicit mention of the 1988 crime against humanity in the resolutionis the only possible way to prevent, in Iran and elsewhere, the reproduction of such crimes. Innocents’ blood would never leave the human conscience alone. The UN General Assembly should stand witness to that.
The writer is former political prisoner, fled Iranian prisons in 1987, settled in Europe, current human rights activist