High Commissioner of the United Nations for Human Rights
Mr High Commissioner,
I am writing to you as an
Iranian political refugee residing in France. I am a former political detainee
and member of a family of victims of the massacre of political prisoners of the
summer of 1988 in Iran.I was arrested in September
1981 and sentenced to 20 years in prison in a mock trial of 10 minutes.
My younger brother Ahmad
Raouf Bachari-doust was only 16 in 1982, when he was arrested in a raid by the
Revolutionary Guards for participating in meetings of the People's Mojahedin of
Iran (PMOI).
Towards the end of 1982,
after several rounds of interrogation and torture, he was sentenced to 5 years'
imprisonment and imprisoned in Rasht Prison and Evin in Tehran and Gohardasht
in the town of Karaj. In March 1988, for the first time, I received a letter
from Ahmad. He had been released after almost six years in prison and was
trying to leave the country to join me abroad.
A few months later, he left the city of Rasht, but he fell into a trap of the regime's intelligence services. He was arrested again and tortured. Ahmad was hanged on Khomeini's orders as more than 30,000 political prisoners executed in the summer 1988 massacre.
In 1991, intelligence
officers told my father that they had executed him in Oroumieh prison in
northwestern Iran, but they did not reveal where they had been buried.
Mr High Commissioner,
In 1988, after six years of
waiting, when I had the hope of seeing my dear brother again, I received the
news of his execution. You can imagine my immense pain, which never ceased
after 29 years. It is an open wound that is still bleeding. After 29 years, we
could not mourn, because the executioners did not hand over my brother's
remains to my family, nor informed him where he was buried. After 29 years,
justice has not been done and the criminals are still in power in Iran.
My father has been looking
for his son's grave for 29 years, as are the parents of another 30,000 victims
of this crime against humanity committed by the mullahs in Iran on Khomeini's
orders in the summer of 1988.
In the summer of 2016, the
dissemination on social networks of a shocking audio tape of the meeting
between Montazeri, the deposed successor of Khomeini, and members of the
"death commission" on 15 August 1988, revealed the scale of the 1988
massacre in Iran.
Ayatollah Montazeri calls on
those responsible for genocide: "The greatest crime committed under the
Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us, was committed by you. Your
(names) will be engraved in the annals of history as criminals."
As for the members of the
death commission, they have still not been punished and continue to occupy key
posts:
On 8 August, Mullahs'
president Hassan Rohani appointed Alireza Avai, a member of the death
commission responsible for the massacre in Khuzestan province, to succeed
Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi as Minister of Justice. Avai's predecessor, who was also
a member of the "commission of death" in Tehran and whose voice can
be heard in the Montazeri recording, told the Tasnim news agency on 28 August
2016: "We are proud to have applied the the divine commandment with regard
to the hypocrites (Mojahedin of the people) ... " Nayyeri, another member
of the death commission, is currently head of the Special Court for the Clergy,
and Raïssi was appointed by the Supreme Leader to the powerful Astan-e-Quds Foundation
after being a prosecutor general…
Today the movement to seek
justice for these victims of that horrible crime is gaining momentum in Iran
and will not let go of the matter. This tragedy has separated the Iranian
society and the regime of the mullahs with a canyon full of the blood of those
innocents. Years have passed. But the wound of Iranian society has not closed
and we will "neither forget nor forgive.” And the Persian year of 1367
(equivalent to the year 1988) has become the code word for this bloody
injustice. The generations who were born after my brother Ahmad are today
searching for truth and justice for the victims of the "biggest crime
committed under the Islamic Republic" as stated on 15 August 1988 by Hossein-Ali
Montazeri to members of the "commission of death” who were charged with
implementing the decree of mass executions.
Mr High Commissioner,
Is it not time to put an end
to the onslaught of death and execution in Iran? As a victim of the mullahs'
regime in the name of the innocents whose blood was shed, I ask you to act in
the position of responsibility that is yours. We want justice to be done. At
the current session of the UN General Assembly, you can break the silence on the
summer of 1988 massacre in Iran and strongly condemn it in your speech in the
rostrum, asking for the opening of an official investigation.
It is also necessary to condemn
this massacre in the resolution of the UN General Assembly. The United Nations
must take the necessary political and legal measures with respect to the
international prosecution of the regime's leaders for this crime against
humanity.
I am prepared to testify
before all legal and international bodies.
With my thanks, please accept
my respectful greetings.
Mahsomeh Raouf
Enclosed: photo of my brother
Ahmad Raouf Bachari-doust
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