In honour of the martyrs of the 1980s we are not going to observe
even a single minute of silence!
A quarter of a century has gone by since the massacre of thousands
of political prisoners in June 1988. But in June 2013, the "responsibility" for
the post of Ministry of Justice in the government of "action and hope" is being
given to Pour Mohammadi. Mohammadi was the representative of the Ministry of
Intelligence in a trio (together with Nayyeri and Eshraghi) in June 1988. This
notorious group was known as the "trio of death". Mohammadi's posts were head of
the Ministry of Justice in western Iran, then Revolutionary judge in Bandar
Abbas in southern Iran with special authority to suppress protests and issue the
death penalty against the political prisoners being held in Mashhad. Mohammadi
was head of a group who executed women political prisoners for the first time
and supervised the execution of virgin women who were raped before their
execution in order to "prevent them from going to paradise". He supervised the
execution of pregnant women and women who had just given birth. He was assistant
to Fallahian (President Rafsanjani's minister of intelligence) and responsible
for operations outside Iran. During his reign, numerous political figures were
murdered: Dr Ghasemlouv in Vienna; Hossein Naghadi in Rome; Kazem Rajavi in
Geneva; Fereidoon Farrokhzad in Bonn; Sadegh Sharafkandi and Nouri Dehkardi in
Berlin; and many many more. The reality is that if people such as Rouhani and
Pour Mohammadi had not performed their responsibilities successfully, how could
the new rulers have resisted and confronted the waves of revolutionary and
rebellious masses who were determined to change the
world?
With the mass murder, imprisonment and annihilation of a
revolutionary generation who were determined to change the existing order, these
reactionaries wanted to suppress the revolutionary spirit throughout society in
order to thwart any real change. They committed their cowardly massacre of the
prisoners because they were frightened of the unity between them and their
comrades in the bigger prison – the whole of society – which was preparing the
ground for the overthrow of the backward regime of the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
The new IRI President Rouhani and their clique think that they can
hang or execute the truth. This is impossible. That's why, in honour of the
martyrs of the 1980s, we cannot halt even for a moment in proclaiming the truth.
We will have no minute of silence!
For many years, relatives of the martyrs, those who escaped their
fate, together with other revolutionary and progressive opponents of the regime,
have worked to expose the crimes of the Islamic Republic in the 1980s and to
establish the truth. They have talked about the courage of those militants who
persisted right to the end, who gave up their lives, but not their secrets.
Today the slogan "We neither forgive, nor forget!" emphasises the just struggle
of that generation and exposes the crimes of the Islamic Republic. This takes on
particular importance at a time when those responsible for such horrific crimes
are trying to hide their blood-soaked hands amidst talk of justice and
tolerance, while a section of the so-called "opposition" activists are siding
with them and actively throwing dust in the eyes of the masses, so as to blind
them to the reality of what was, and what is. For the purpose of a search for
the truth is not merely to expose the crimes of the past, but to show how to
progress, how to forge the future. Indeed, the struggle in the prisons has a
political and a class character, which itself is the continuation and
concentrated expression of the class struggle outside prison. The massacre of
the revolutionaries in the 1980s did not therefore just represent the murder of
a large number of political activists, it was also the concentrated expression
of the relationship between revolutionary struggle and the consolidation of the
new reactionary regime of the Islamic Republic.
One of the distinguishing features of the prisons in the Islamic
Republic is that, in addition to conducting medieval physical torture, the IRI
also carried out a systematic ideological attack on the thinking and outlook of
the prisoners. The purpose of the rulers was not only to destroy a generation of
revolutionary people, but through this to attack the most sensitive nerve in the
society, with the aim of crippling society as a
whole.
This kind of torture and destruction took on more complex and
broader dimensions. A government whose most important pillar was the
subordination of women was forced to attack those who dared to break through the
boundaries of the rotten social order, as they attacked these high-flying eagles
and demonstrated that they are ready to break their wings and force them to
accept a lower position than in the past. One typical example was rape. Rape as
physical, moral and psychological torture was, and is, the norm of the
patriarchal class formation of the Islamic regime, at every level. And in
addition, in prison this also took on a religious character, as women were
forced to submit their will to the rule of god. In Islam, the existence of women
amounts to being merely a vagina, who surrender to the will of god and his
representatives on Earth, meaning men. Breaking the spirit of these women who
took up arms and fought for their liberation and who were ready to lay down
their lives for the revolutionary cause was no easy task. But they had to be
tamed and punished, made to obey the will of god and his representatives, as a
threat to all women – and this took many forms, from forcing the hejab on
communist and secular women, forced prayers, rape and punishment and torture in
many different forms. This ideological discipline had to be conveyed into
society as a whole. Women political prisoners had to be controlled and
humiliated as wives and mothers, to re-affirm the honour and property of men.
Today, although the rage we felt at the massacre of a generation of
revolutionaries is an invincible motive force driving the search for truth, in
order for a new revolutionary wave to rise again, we need a deep scientific
summation of the reasons for the defeat of the revolution in Iran and around the
world. Our rage and determination to get justice can be a driving force for
lifting that wave. We will never forget the memory of the unconquerable
resistance of the political prisoners massacred in the 1980s, and especially in
the summer of 1988. They are and will be an important element in our struggle to
overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is true especially now, when a
quarter of a century has gone by since that massacre behind the prison walls,
yet the torture and murder within or outside the prison walls goes on – as does
the resistance and struggle and the demand for change, for the emancipation of
humanity as a whole, for building a world where no one will be imprisoned or
executed for having an opposing opinion or ideas!
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