By: Mostafa Naderi
The Amnesty International published a report on Tuesday condemning the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988 by the mullahs' regime. Most of the victims were members and supporters of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The report is an awaking reminder of the potentials of creating a similar slaughter should there be a desperate need for ruling clerics.
Let us not forget that the same people the AI holds accountable and calls them "responsible for the killings," are still in power today. To start from the top Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader then was the president; Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani now the president of the powerful Expediency Council and head of the Assembly of Experts was then the Speaker of Majlis (parliament) and deputy commander of the Iranian regime's armed forces; the former Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi was then a member of what was called “Death Commission" in the summer of 1988 – he was replaced recently by a controversial figure, Ali Kordan who forged a diploma from Oxford University to get a confidence vote from the Majlis. The former president Mohammad Khatami, once naively thought by the West to be a moderate Mullah was also involved in that onslaught. He was the Director of Cultural Affairs at the Armed Forces General Command.
"International human rights law requires that the Iranian authorities carry out thorough and impartial investigations into violations of the right to life such as those which were committed during the 'prison massacre,' which began in 1988 and continued into the following year, and to identify and bring to justice those responsible. The failure to do so to date and the time that has elapsed since the killings do not in any way reduce this responsibility," it is a very good mandate by the AI, however it cannot happen since "those" committed the mischief have to "prosecute" themselves. That has not happened to date.
What is most disturbing is a fact overlooked; victims of 1988 mass executions were the members and supporters of the PMOI. Maybe it is a bizarre twist of the events that time has moved forward by two decades but the same fear is alive among the mullahs' of the 3,500 residents of Ashraf City (home to the members of the PMOI in Iraq), among them people who barely and by mere luck escaped the "Death Commission," of the summer of 1988.
History does not have to repeat itself. The members of the PMOI do not have to go through the same inferno again by having their protection handed over to those elements most hostile to them. It is only wise to think that in Iraq today which mullahs' have the ability to stir violence, it is the responsibly of the international community especially that of the US forces to continue protecting the unarmed sworn enemies of the mullahs' barbaric regime.
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Mostafa Naderi is a former political prisoner who spent 12 years in different Iranian regime's jails. He spent five years of his incarceration in solitary confinement and barely escaped the 1988 massacre of the political prisoners in Iran.
