Iran regime’s next president officially begins his four-year term of office on Thursday. That date marks the beginning of what the Iranian opposition leader, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi referred to as a “new era,” in Iran and one that will be defined by an increase in “hostility and enmity between the Iranian regime and society.”
The overwhelming majority of Iran’s population protested Ebrahim Raisi’s presidential candidacy by participating in a boycott of the tightly-controlled race in which he was the only viable candidate. Frustrated by the regime’s decision to install a known human rights abuser to the country’s second-highest office, people embraced the message of the Iranian opposition. For about two months leading up to the June 18 election, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran urged all Iranians to view the boycott as a means to “vote for regime change.”
Less than ten percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the sham election. The message of that boycott was reinforced the very next day with the outbreak of large-scale unrest, which has expanded to the present day. While many of the past six weeks’ protests initially started due to labor disputes, blackouts, and water shortages, they assumed the same anti-regime slogans that defined nationwide uprisings in January 2018 and November 2019.
The recent demonstrations over water shortages in Khuzestan Province have inspired displays of solidarity from residents of more than a dozen other provinces, regarding both the regime’s role in exacerbating the crisis and the violent reaction from security forces, who killed several people within a week of the unrest breaking out on July 15. That crackdown on dissent quickly drew comparisons to the regime’s response to the nationwide uprisings, especially in 2019. Then, security forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps opened fire on crowds of protesters almost immediately after they took to the streets. More than 1,500 people were killed and thousands of others were arrested and threatened with torture over a period of months.
Notably, one of the leading contributors to that crackdown was none other than Ebrahim Raisi, who had been appointed to head the judiciary several months earlier. In that capacity, he oversaw an expansion in the range of cases that made use of the death penalty, though Iran under the mullahs’ regime had long established itself as the country with the highest per-capita rate of executions in the entire world. His enthusiastic promotion of capital and corporal punishment had an impact on the regime’s response to unrest and helped to fuel the campaign of torture that was detailed in a 2020 Amnesty International report titled Trampling Humanity.
Raisi’s legacy as judiciary chief certainly helped to motivate participation in the electoral boycott and the preceding protests against his presidential candidacy. Just as certainly, that legacy contributed to the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s decision to choose Raisi, even excluding other well-known loyalists and insiders like former Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani. With popular unrest being more-or-less constant since the end of 2017, Khamenei was clearly intent on consolidating power and promoting political violence as the only acceptable means of maintaining order.
Raisi was the best outlet for that strategy, as Khamenei well knew before appointing him to head the judiciary. In the summer of 1988, as Deputy Prosecutor for Tehran, Raisi assumed a leading role on the “death commission” in the capital city which was tasked with implementing a fatwa by the regime’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini. The religious edict declared that groups opposing the theocratic system, especially the MEK, were inherently guilty of “enmity against God” and that their members should be summarily executed. The Tehran death commission soon became the first among many similar panels throughout the country, and over the course of about three months, they interrogated and then executed over 30,000 political prisoners.
It is a bitter irony that Raisi’s presidential inauguration roughly coincides with the anniversary of those executions reaching their peak. In August the killings were taking place at such a rate that refrigerator trucks were filled with the bodies of victims before they were taken away to be buried in secret mass graves. The locations of those graves largely remain a secret to this day, and although Iranian Resistance Units and the MEK supporters have worked tirelessly to expose them, regime authorities have initiated projects to bury the evidence beneath development projects, thereby preemptively impeding any future investigation.
Such an investigation is more imperative now than it has been at any other point in history. The day after Raisi’s selection, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Calamard said in a statement: “That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran.”
That impunity needs to be challenged, and the Iranian people are doing their part through protests which show signs of accelerating past the start of Raisi’s “new era.” But the international community cannot stand on the sidelines of this emerging conflict. Western powers and the United Nations must show solidarity with the Iranian people by initiating a long-overdue investigation into the 1988 massacre and taking measures to hold Raisi and others accountable for the human rights abuses that are shamelessly celebrated by the regime.