Khamenei's Fear of Public Outrage of Regime Crimes, Especially in 1980s, and Popular Acceptance of Resistance

Praising a film made by IRGC for whitening these crimes, and ordering a film to whitewash the butcher of Tehran

While public outrage and hatred of the massacre of political prisoners in the 80s is growing, the Justice-Seeking movement is advancing, and the PMOI and Iranian Resistance are more welcomed by the Iranian people, Khamenei resorts to a humiliated act to praise the film titled as "Majera-ye Nimrouz". This film was made upon Khamenei’s order by the fascist bands of the Revolutionary Guards and was aimed at whitewashing and justifying the numerous crimes of this regime in the 1980s.

The government's media reported on July 15 that the film was shown to Khamenei, after which its producers went to meet Khamenei. While praising the film producers, he said, “The film was very good. All the components of the movie were great, it was directed greatly. The actors and the scenario were excellent. The film was well-made.” Prior to this, even some state-affiliated individuals had made comments regarding the distortion of historical events in the film and had said that the film narrated a period when the government executed PMOI members mercilessly.

Khamenei's meeting with the producers of the film, which happened in March last year according to state media, was made public with a few months delay at a time when Khamenei and the regime at its totality received a terrible blow from the Iranian people and Resistance and failed to bring Ebrahim Reisi to the office in presidential election.

Fifteen days after this defeat, Khamenei warned on June 4th against the change of place of the martyr and hangman in the 80s.

In that meeting, Khamenei called for producing a film about Assadullah Lajevardi, who was nicknamed the butcher of Tehran and Eichmann of Iran, and said: "Let's do something for Mr. Lajevardi. He is one of the characters that deserves something to be done for him.” Lajevardi was hated by all the Iranian people for executing tens of thousands of political prisoners and imposing the most brutal tortures on political prisoners, especially on women. So many pregnant women, young girls and elderly mothers were executed by this hangman. The number of executed prisoners in 1981 and 1982 sometimes reached 400 political prisoners per day.

Azghandi, one of the agents of Khamenei's gang, revealed the mullahs’ regime’s fear of the widespread Justice-Seeking movement and said, “In the 2010s, they are putting Khomeini under question via the 1980s slogans, and have started trialing Khomeini.” He attacked the other faction for admitting to some of the crimes of the regime's anti-human crimes and said: "These individuals have been responsible for the security of the country for 30 years, for 20 years. No security orders were issued without their signatures; half of our authorities have been working for the Intelligence Ministry….Members of our government have a background of working for the Ministry of Intelligence.... These acts mean the destruction of Imam (Khomeini); they don’t mention anything about Imam, the target is Imam himself though…” (State TV-channel 1- July 14, 2017)

Iran Acknowledges Massacre of Political Prisoners

“It is not easy to keep silent when the silence is a lie.”
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables

For three decades Iran lied about the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in summer of 1988, and kept silent about this atrocity. But in this year’s presidential election as conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisie, one of the perpetrators of the massacre, was selected as one of the main candidates, the issue surfaced, forcing regime officials, one after another, to confess about the carnage.
“Executions in 1988 were fair and legal…[Iranian regime founder Ruhollah] Khomeini carried out a measure no other clergy was able to throughout history …Khomeini was decisive and had no reservations over God’s will, and God’s will was that all enemies of God must be executed…Imam (Khomeini) did not pay any attention to the West’s human rights claims… At the time 80 to 90 percent of high school and university students supported opposition groups. We started the trails and after convicting them, in a period of two to three months the card was turned around… my friends and I, all together we were 20 judges in the country, and we carried out something that guaranteed the security of the country for that year and the years to come, so the MEK can never rise again, because in a period that they were getting strong we suffocated them.” said Mullah Ali Razini, prosecutor of branch 41 of Iran’s Supreme Court, about the 1988 massacre in his July 2nd interview with the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
In the summer of 1988 Khomeini issued a religious decree calling for the massacre.
“Whoever at any stage continues to belong to the [People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)] must be executed. Annihilate the enemies of Islam immediately!…Those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the MEK are waging war on God, and are condemned to execution…It is naive to show mercy to those who wage war on God,” reads part of the decree.
A committee of four men was formed to implement the order, and in a matter of few months over 30,000 political prisoners were executed, mostly members and supporters of the main opposition PMOI/MEK.
Last year the revelation of an audio tape and unpublished letters of the late Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, former successor to Khomeini, shed light on new dimensions of this great crime. Pregnant women and girls as young as 14 and 15 years old were among those executed, Montazeri wrote.
“A full accounting of what’s called the “death commission” created by Khomeini has yet to be carried out. But thousands died — by hanging or firing squad or in places such as Tehran’s Evin prison,” according to a 1990 Amnesty International report.
The families of the victims had been imprisoned, tortured and suppressed not to ask about their loved ones.
“Prisoner of conscience Maryam Akbari Monfared has been threatened with an additional three-year prison term and exile to a remote prison. This was in reprisal for her open letters seeking truth and justice for her siblings who were extrajudicially executed in 1988. She has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison since 2009 serving a 15-year sentence,” Amnesty reported on 3 November 2016.
In another report in 2009, Amnesty called on “Iranian authorities to immediately stop the destruction of hundreds of individual and mass, unmarked graves in Khavaran, south Tehran, to ensure that the site is preserved and to initiate a forensic investigation at the site as part of a long-overdue, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into mass executions which began in 1988, often referred to in Iran as the ‘prison massacres’. The organization fears that these actions of the Iranian authorities are aimed at destroying evidence of human rights violations and depriving the families of the victims of the 1988 killings of their right to truth, justice and reparation.”
All we hear in the West is about Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and their malignant actions in the neighboring countries. For far too long the West has turned a blind eye to Iran’s atrocious human rights violations.
Marking the 29th anniversary of this horrific purge, the time has come to hold the mullah’s regime accountable for crimes against humanity.