Iran's Opposition Leader Accused in 1988 Massacre

(June 9) -- This Saturday marks the first anniversary of Iran's disputed presidential election, which the opposition claims was rigged to guarantee the victory of the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For many people across the world, the runner-up in that flawed vote, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has become a symbol of hope and dignity in the face of repression. Despite threats from the regime's enforcers, who shot dead his nephew during a street protest last December, and have arrested and tortured hundreds of his Green Movement supporters, Mousavi has continued to push for much-needed reform of the Islamic Republic.

But according to a new report issued by a U.S.-based Iranian human rights organization, Mousavi hasn't always been so tolerant of dissent. It accuses him of being complicit in the 1988 massacre of 10,000 political prisoners while he was serving as prime minister under Ayatollah Khomeini, and calls on the U.N. to prosecute Mousavi, and other regime members, for crimes against humanity.

The paper, put together by leading London-based human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC for the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, details the mass execution of the regime's opponents in the summer of '88, soon after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Iran's jails were crammed with activists who had helped overthrow the Shah some nine years earlier -- including Marxists, social democrats, liberals and members of Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization, a revolutionary Islamic movement -- but opposed Ayatollah Khomeini's theocracy. Many inmates had been arrested in the early 1980s for taking part in street protests or possessing banned political literature.

Determined to finally rid itself of the last remnants of opposition, the Islamic regime sorted prisoners into two categories: "repenters," who had abandoned their former views, and "steadfast" apostates who refused to admit the error of their ways. Revolutionary Guard soldiers then descended on the prisons, and declared the unrepentant inmates "mohareb" (warriors against god). The men and women were then blindfolded, led out of their cells and sent to the gallows.

"They were hung from cranes, four at a time, or in groups of six from ropes hanging from the front of the stage in an assembly hall," writes Robertson. "Their bodies were doused with disinfectant, packed in refrigerated trucks and buried by night in mass graves." Three months later the prisoners' possessions, wrapped in plastic bags, were returned to their relatives. Families were not told where their loved ones were buried, and have since been forbidden from gathering at a suspected cemetery in Tehran.

Robertson argues that the U.N. should treat the cold-blooded murder of the 10,000 prisoners as genocide, as the victims were executed because of their religious beliefs. Or rather, due to their lack of faith in "the God whom the Supreme Leader represented on earth."

Ayatollah Khomeini -- who as Supreme Leader was the ultimate architect of the executions -- has since died, but the report argues that surviving regime members should face trial at the International Criminal Court. These include then-president Ali Khamenei, now the country's Supreme Leader, and Ali Rafsanjani, former commander of the Revolutionary Guard. Robertson says Mousavi, who as serving prime minister at the time of the killings had some ministerial control over Iran's prisons, should be forced to explain how "barbarism became state policy" on his "watch."

Mousavi has recently attempted to shake off allegations of his involvement in the murders. During his 2009 election campaign, he answered student questions about the massacres by saying that his branch of the executive had nothing to do with the "trials." However, he was less evasive in a December 1988 interview with an Austrian journalist. "[The prisoners] had plans to perpetrate killings and massacres," he claimed. "We had to crush the conspiracy ... in that respect we have no mercy."

Critics may claim that Robertson's report, which has appeared just as the U.N. votes on implementing further sanctions on Tehran over its alleged nuclear program, is little more than another piece of Iran-bashing propaganda. But the lawyer argues that attaining justice for the 10,000 victims -- many of whom, he admits, "were in some way sympathetic to terrorists, communists or Iraq [the national enemy]" -- is vital for political prisoners everywhere.

"Convicts make for particularly useful scapegoats, and if the temptation to slaughter them is to be kept at bay in the future, notorious cases in the recent past must be exposed and expiated," he says. "Otherwise, the weasel-worded 'justifications' offered in 1988 by Mousavi ... will be heard again, from other statesmen at other times."