20 Years After the Massacre of Iran’s Political Prisoners

Khavaran, a graveyard where thousands are buried in unmarked mass graves/City Boy

20 October 2008. A World to Win News Service. The twentieth anniversary of the massacre of political prisoners in Iran was marked by meetings and demonstrations in many cities on 11 October. Among them were activities organized by the 8 March Organization of Iranian and Afghan women. A rally in London’s Trafalgar Square was combined with mass leafleting and a photo exhibition directed at the tens of thousands of people of all nationalities who pass through there on a Saturday. Passers-by were encouraged to take part in a debate about religious rule as well as the danger of war. Paris saw a political meeting held in cooperation with the Turkish Workers Association, including a documentary film and a report on a recent hunger strike by Kurdish prisoners in Iran. Demonstrations also took place in The Hague, Bremen (Germany), Finland and, during the summer months (when the 1988 massacre began), Toronto.

Following are excerpts from an article in the September issue of Haghighat, organ of Communist Party of Iran (MLM). It was taken from a document that circulated earlier within the party regarding the preparations for commemoration activities. The comments in parentheses are by AWTWNS.

On the 20th Anniversary of the Massacre of Iran’s Political Prisoners

In its brutality and breadth, the 1988 massacre in the Islamic regime’s prisons was one of the most horrible crimes against revolutionaries that the Iranian ruling class has ever committed in its entire history. Even the Pahlavi and Qajar dynasties did not commit crimes of such magnitude. (The Pahlavi dynasty, from 1925-1979, ended with the revolution that was eventually hijacked by the Islamic fundamentalists. The Qajar dynasty, 1796-1925, was also extremely cruel.)

Let’s not allow the nature of this issue to be shown upside down

The imprisonment, execution and murder of revolutionaries and other opposition activists are integral parts of imposing a dictatorship against working class and all the masses of people by the state of the reactionary classes. The purpose of the suppression of revolutionary communists and non-communists is not only to annihilate them but also to suppress the political activities and protests of the masses and smash their dreams of emancipation and their attempts to achieve a world different than this world of exploitation and oppression. That is why we should strive to make the issue of the massacre of political prisoners into one of the central questions for all social movements and in particular those of workers, women and students.

Today we can see some people who were high officials in the Islamic regime at that time, including the security organs that arrested, tortured and executed the fighters and militants, shedding the crocodile tears for the massacre of the summer of 1988.

They deny that this massacre was part of the functioning of the Islamic Republic state. They try to blame these murders and other executions and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of regime opponents on one despotic and authoritarian faction within the ruling power structure. Others blame the regime’s religious fundamentalist ideology. They claim that the problem can be resolved ousting this faction from the ruling circles and/or by weakening this fundamentalist tendency. Those putting forward these reactionary views include Akbar Ganji, Abdol Soroush and Mohsen Sazegara. (All three were regime officials during the years of horror in the ’80s. Akbar Ganji later recycled himself as a pro-Khatami “reform” journalist. Soroush was an intellectual theoretician of the regime’s Islamic philosophy. Sazegara was one of the founders of the Pasdaran, the regime’s so-called Revolutionary Guard elite troops. Each left the country at one time or another and become a critic of some aspects of the regime. Sazegara is now closely working with the U.S. imperialists and is a frequent guest on the Persian service of the U. S. government’s Voice of America television propaganda broadcasts.)

The reality is that, first of all, the top leaders of all of the regime factions were united around the need to commit this massacre. Secondly, this crime was an essential part of the functioning of the feudal-comprador system that the Islamic Republic of Iran represents.

This massacre and the IRI’s other crimes against the people were not the ideas and the acts of a few officials or leaders of the IRI or a faction of the ruling power. Such crimes were and will be integral to the functioning of the state of this class as a whole and their efforts to save and protect their political power. It was and will be the confrontation of revolution and counter-revolution. There is no doubt that religious Islamic ideology is a special kind of ideology, corresponding to an exploiting class that has its own kind of brutality and its own characteristics. In fact, the experience of the IRI has shown that the combination of Islam and imperialist-dependent capitalism is a highly dangerous and horrible mix.

We should deeply understand the slogan “We will not forget and we will not forgive” and make sure the people understand it. The point is not revenge. It is that we must never forget that a tremendous amount of sacrifice and courage is required to liberate society.

The conditions of the 1988 massacre

At that time the IRI was confronted with prisoners who not only had refused to repent and repudiate their revolutionary activities and ideas but also had become more trained and more politically conscious while in captivity. The regime’s brutal efforts to produce repentant prisoners on a large scale had been defeated by waves of resistance and struggles. Furthermore, the prisoners had been victorious in a major hunger strike that they had waged in 1986, and this was an outstanding reflection of the high spirits prevailing among them. In fact, the prisons had become a stalwart trench of the revolution. This is the red thread that links the massacres throughout the decade of the 1980s and the massacre of 1988.
At the same time, the regime faced crisis on several fronts. The Cold War was coming to an end, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union had come to an agreement to end the Iran-Iraq war. These two superpowers that had supplied weapons and arms to both countries to fan the flames of the war no longer saw its continuation as in their regional interests, and they had begun to pressure both regimes to end the war.

So Khomeini had to drink the “bowl of poison” (as he explained his acceptance of an agreement to end the war). Further, Khomeini was dying and regime was faced with the crisis of replacing him. In addition, oil revenue had fallen to one of its lowest levels, plunging the regime into an economic crisis. Revelations about secret contacts between the Islamic Republic and the U.S. (known as “Iran-Contra”, because the Reagan administration was selling arms to Iran to fund its Contra death squads fighting the Nicaraguan government) had intensified the contradictions among the various regime factions. Relations between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic had been initiated and developed secretly. The two regimes had reached important agreements to end the Iran-Iraq war and adopt the economic policies required by the World Bank and IMF.

With their silence, the U.S. and the European imperialist powers had given the IRI and the Iraqi regime a green light to suppress their people internally. It was “understandable” for the U.S. and the Europeans that at such a difficult moment (ending the war and adopting these economic policies completely contradicted their previous rhetoric), the IRI needed to suppress the communists and revolutionary opposition and in general all the people in order to ensure stability. All the signs indicate that these powers had agreed with the IRI on this issue or at least had “understood” its necessity.

The IRI did not limit itself to suppression. They planned to combine the suppression with deception in order to buy the silence of the middle class and political forces such as the religious-nationalists and some vacillating intellectuals. Akbar Rafsanjani (the first president of Iran after the Iran-Iraq war) arrived on the scene with the slogan of creating a political, cultural and literature “opening”. The new government permitted various newspapers to be published and gave some space to some writers and artists and certain political forces such as “Nehzate Azadi” (a religious-nationalist grouping headed by Ibrahim Yazdi) and similar forces and in this way bought their shameful silence. However, later these people themselves became victims.

Today we must unite broadly to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the ‘88 massacre, convey a strong and hopeful message to the people and today’s activists, and send a warning to the regime and all its collaborators. We cannot answer this crime just by hailing the martyrs and expressing our hatred for the enemy. We must draw from, learn from, absorb and apply the lessons of the valuable experiences of the political prisoners in terms of the unity among different tendencies inside the prisons in order to organize resistance and struggle against the regime.

We will wage a campaign of propagation and agitation around this big crime and organize various struggles in order to make the truth about this crime a part of the consciousness of the masses of people (especially the youth), raise their understanding of the real nature of the IRI and the depth of the regime’s hatred for the proletariat and oppressed people, and familiarize and inspire them with the heroic struggles that communists, revolutionaries and other freedom-lovers have waged against this regime.

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