{"id":7253,"date":"2025-01-17T16:04:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T15:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/?p=7253"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:02:48","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T09:02:48","slug":"20-years-of-silence-a-legal-and-political-analysis-of-the-demand-for-accountability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/2025\/01\/17\/20-years-of-silence-a-legal-and-political-analysis-of-the-demand-for-accountability\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty Years of Silence: A Legal and Political Analysis of the Demand for Accountability"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Twenty Years of Silence: A Legal and Political Analysis of the Demand for Accountability<\/em><\/p>\n

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Kaveh Shahrooz<\/em>, <\/em>Lawyer based in New York.\u00a0 Graduate of Harvard Law School. Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Stockholm<\/em>, Sweden<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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August 22, 2008<\/em><\/p>\n

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Good afternoon.<\/p>\n

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Before I begin, I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to the organizers of this event who were gracious in extending an invitation to me.\u00a0 I am thankful that I have an opportunity to participate in such an important event on such an important yet tragic occasion.\u00a0 It\u2019s my first time here in your lovely city of Stockholm, and aside from just being delighted to see this city, I\u2019m also happy to see that in Sweden there exists a strong network of human rights activists and former political prisoners, a network among local Swedish activists and activists who are part of the diaspora.\u00a0 I hope that, thanks to events like this, we can expand that network further to include those of us who are on the other side of the Atlantic in the US and Canada.\u00a0 There are obviously very large Iranian diaspora populations in those countries, and among them are individuals and groups which are very active politically.\u00a0 We need to build links and strengthen ties among activists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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As has been mentioned, this summer is the 20th<\/sup> anniversary of a massacre that stands without parallel in contemporary Iranian history.\u00a0 It is a grim and tragic anniversary.\u00a0 It is also an anniversary that has largely gone unacknowledged by Iranians and members of the international community.\u00a0 Aside from the occasional event like this, one generally doesn\u2019t hear of major vigils held to commemorate the event.\u00a0 One doesn\u2019t hear of the world\u2019s major human rights organizations releasing reports to coincide with this anniversary.\u00a0 One generally doesn\u2019t hear any talk about obtaining justice in this case.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sadly, one generally doesn\u2019t hear anything at all about this crime.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What we need now on the 20th<\/sup> anniversary of this massacre, more than ever, is to shatter this pervasive silence surrounding this massacre.\u00a0 To do this, I want to first recount the story of 1988.\u00a0 The story may be new to some in the audience, but for those of you who are former political prisoners, who bravely endured the barbaric prisons of the Iranian government, who were tortured physically and psychologically, this will be a repetition of what you already know well.\u00a0 I apologize for that repetition, but I think it\u2019s important to tell and re-tell this story, not just as an explanation of why we must act, not just as a way to ensure that a younger generation \u2013 my generation \u2013 understands the struggle, but also as a form of resistance against a government that has tried, since 1988, to bury the crime along with the victims; and a resistance against a tendency among the diaspora community \u2013 academics, lawyers, human rights activists, and people from other walks of life \u2013 a tendency among them to simply acquiesce\u00a0 in this induced historical amnesia.\u00a0 Telling the story is a resistance against a government that has committed a double crime against each of the political prisoners:\u00a0 the first crime was obviously the gruesome murder, and the second is the effort to completely erase them from the historical narrative.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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After speaking about the crime, I want to devote some time to assessing the crime under international criminal law.\u00a0 I want to talk about the elements of the crime, and the categories of perpetrators.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Finally, I want to end by speaking about the tasks ahead, and the legal and political challenges ahead for those seeking accountability in this case.\u00a0 It is important that another 20 years from now, we don\u2019t gather and talk about how the 40th<\/sup> anniversary of the massacre is unacknowledged.\u00a0 Let\u2019s hope instead, that by that time, there will have been some justice.\u00a0 But that won\u2019t be easy, and I want to talk about why that is.<\/p>\n

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So, with that by way of an introduction, let me begin by first discussing what happened in Iran\u2019s prisoners exactly 20 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Iran\u2019s Islamic government had, immediately after the revolution, in 1980 and 81, unleashed a wave of violence and executions.\u00a0 But even after these executions, the prisons remained full of prisoners of every age, gender and political affiliation.\u00a0 Mostly, the political prisoners were from the Mojahedin or from a number of secular left-wing parties.\u00a0 As Amnesty International and other organizations have pointed out, the political prisoners in the 1980\u2019s had not been afforded anything even remotely resembling a fair trial.\u00a0 They were arrested on very vague charges, tortured, and then faced trials that lasted a minute or two.\u00a0 No defense offered.\u00a0 No appeals.\u00a0 No safeguards.\u00a0 And it\u2019s also worth pointing out, as Amnesty and others have done, these prisoners were generally in prison for very minor and non-violent \u201coffenses\u201d like selling books and newspapers, attending meetings, organizing solidarity groups, and things of that sort.<\/p>\n

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In late 1987 and early 1988, with the notorious Asadollah Lajevardi back at the helm of Iran\u2019s prisons, the government began a process of re-interrogating and re-categorization of prisoners.\u00a0 Prisoners at prisons like Gohar-Dasht and Evin were typically brought \u2013 sometime blindfolded, sometimes not — before panels to be re-questioned.\u00a0 The questions they were asked varied from prison to prison, and were often based on political affiliation.\u00a0 They would be asked whether they accepted the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, whether they\u2019d be willing to publicly condemn their group, etc\u2026<\/p>\n

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Based on those answer, the prisoners were divided up based on their continued level of resistance, their length of sentence, their religiosity.\u00a0 Some of the so-called \u201ctroublemakers\u201d were moved from the general ward into solitary confinement.\u00a0 Some of the prisoners were moved between Evin and Gohardasht.<\/p>\n

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This unusual re-interrogation really undermines the theory, posited by many, that the executions that occurred in the summer of 1988 were somehow the reaction of a panicked government that had been attacked militarily by an opposition group.\u00a0 In fact, the methodical way in which this re-organization occurred indicates that the government may have been laying the groundwork for such a massacre and was looking for some means of making the process more efficient.\u00a0 A number of former prisoners have pointed out this reorganization had the effect of disrupting sophisticated communication networks the prisoners had developed over the years.\u00a0 This may have, in fact, been part of the massacre preparation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Mid-July of 1988 rolled around and Iran decided, after having faced severe defeats in the battlefield in the last year or two of the war, to accept the UN Resolution 598 and end the war.\u00a0 Khomeini drank from the so-called poisoned chalice.\u00a0 The war was ended.\u00a0 The prisoners thought they were coming home.\u00a0 How wrong they were.<\/p>\n

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Shortly after the ceasefire was announced, the military wing of the Mojahedin launched a very ill-conceived attack on Iran\u2019s western border and were defeated soundly.\u00a0 Very shortly thereafter, the massacre began.\u00a0 As an aside, I want to point out, as I did a moment ago, that I think the connection between the Mojahedin attack and the executions is not as close as it appears at first.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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On or about July 27th<\/sup>, the Iranian the prisons went into lockdown.\u00a0 Visits were suspended.\u00a0 Televisions were taken from the wards and radio broadcasts stopped.\u00a0 Prisoners were not permitted to visit the infirmary.\u00a0 Basically, all communication between the prison and the outside world ceased.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Initially, the prisoners from left-wing secular parties were isolated and the massacre of the Mojahedin prisoners began.\u00a0 Those prisoners were taken from their cells, and in what must have been someone\u2019s idea of a perverse joke, told that they would be meeting with a commission that would grant amnesty.\u00a0 The prisoners were taken, often blindfolded, and told to line up.\u00a0 When they met the commission, it was not an amnesty commission.\u00a0 It was, in fact, a commission that would come to be called the \u201cDeath Commission\u201d comprised of a representative of the judiciary, the prosecutor\u2019s office and the intelligence ministry.\u00a0 The figures on Tehran\u2019s commission were diverse, but some of the better-known ones include (J) Jaffar Nayyeri, (P) Morteza Eshraghi, (P) Ebrahim Raisee, (I) Mostafa Pour-mohammadi.\u00a0 Some have named Ismail Shooshtari and others as members of the commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The commission decided on whether a Mojahed prisoner would live or die often based on only one question: What political party do you belong to?\u00a0 To answer \u201cmojahedin\u201d was to seal one\u2019s own fate.\u00a0 The \u201ccorrect\u201d answer was Monafeqin.\u00a0 (For those in the audience that may not know, the term Monafeqin, meaning hypocrites, is a religiously loaded term, is derived from the Koran, and is a term by which the Iranian government refers to the Mojahedin.)\u00a0 If a prisoner got past this initial threshold question, he or she would then be asked about religious views, opposition to the government, and his or her willingness to publicly denounce his organization, his or her willingness to given names of resistant prisoners, and willingness to go on missions to clear landmines from the war front.\u00a0\u00a0 Based on these answers, the Death Commission would decide, by a plurality of votes, whether the prisoner would hang.\u00a0 In Evin, when it was decided that a prisoner was to be executed, he\u2019d be guided to a line on the left side of a hallway, taken to a small room to write a last will and then taken to the amphitheater to hang.\u00a0 The whole process, from start to finish, was a matter of minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The prisoners report that there was chaos in the lead up to the death chambers, and often prison guards would take prisoners they didn\u2019t like and simply put them in the execution line.\u00a0 That is how matters of life and death were decided.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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During this time when the Mojahedin faced a massacre, the leftist prisoners were generally kept isolated and had no idea what was happening.\u00a0 There were clues about the massacre, however.\u00a0 One prisoner recalls seeing an Afghan prison worker coming in and miming a noose around his neck, as a way to signal what was happening.\u00a0 The prisoner interpreted that to mean that perhaps Khomeini had died.\u00a0 Some heard a helicopter that would come, twice a week, and carry the members of the roving Death Commission.\u00a0 Some got morse code messages, tapped on prison walls, from Mojahedin prisoners about a massacre underway.\u00a0 But they found that too hyperbolic to believe. Some in Gohar-Dasht saw guards with facemasks entering the prison amphitheater and would see bodies being taken out of the prison. But they often thought that these were just the bodies of Mojahedin soldiers killed in the skirmish at the border.\u00a0 In talking to prisoners and reading their memoirs, one is often struck by the fact that prisoner after prisoner noticed these clues, but did not immediately think that a massacre was underway.\u00a0 To them, it was just too unexpected that such a thing would occur.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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When the authorities finished with the Mojahedin in late August, they turned to the leftists.\u00a0 Some of the leftist prisoners had caught on to what was happening and were more prepared than the Mojahedin prisoners had been.\u00a0 Some of them gave strategic answers to questions about their political beliefs and their religious beliefs to ensure that they survived.\u00a0 By and large, they faced the same type of questioning as the Mojahedin prisoners had faced and the same type of brutality, though the questioning they faced had a lot of theological elements.\u00a0 There was really an effort to decipher whether the prisoner was a mortad (apostate) or a mohareb (waging war on God.)\u00a0 One scholar has referred to it as an inquisition in the classic sense of the word, and it really was.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Probably the only group of prisoners to collectively escape death were leftist female prisoners.\u00a0 The Mojahedin women were mostly found to be mohareb and hanged.\u00a0 The female leftists, however, were found not to have sufficient agency, as women, to be deemed as apostates.\u00a0 So, as one commentator has pointed out, the Iranian government\u2019s misogyny, in fact, ended up saving a lot of women in this case. Of course, the female prisoners were subject to horrific floggings and so on afterwards, and a number simply committed suicide because they couldn\u2019t bear it, but they were not generally killed in that wave of executions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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After about three months of this brutality, the families, who had for months been desperate for information, were notified and told to come and collect their loved ones\u2019 belongings.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t told about the date of execution, or method, or burial spot, and they had to agree not to hold funerals or erect public memorials to their loved ones.\u00a0 When a representative of the UN appeared in Iran to investigate allegations of human rights abuses, even very small monuments built to those prisoners by their families, a few stones, some flowers, etc\u2026 were torn down.<\/p>\n

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Immediately after the massacre, the government launched what can only be described as a fairly well-orchestrated denial campaign, in which its representatives spoke to the international press and to human right organizations and international agencies and simply denied the massacre ever occurred.\u00a0 People like Rafsanjani and Khamenei simply said that a few people had been killed, but that they were Mojahedin combatants who were involved in the military attack on Iran.\u00a0 Abdullah Nouri, who would later become the darling of the reform camp and a close associate of President Khatami, and who was the interior minister in the 1980\u2019s, spoke to the UN and said that \u201ca campaign had been organized abroad alleging that invaders captured on the battlefield had been executed en masse, together with imprisoned members of the same group.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cBut\u201d he went on to say, \u201cIslamic law and the Government of the Islamic Republic respect human dignity and have organized the institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the basis of that essential principle.\u201d<\/p>\n

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***<\/p>\n

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As I mentioned at the outset, I want to just talk a little bit about this massacre in the framework of international criminal law.\u00a0\u00a0 Without delving too deeply into technical discussions, I want to point out that the 1988 massacre is almost a textbook definition of crimes against humanity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The concept of crimes against humanity is now a firmly established concept in customary international law, and has a rich jurisprudence that begins roughly at the start of the 20th<\/sup> century, continues in earnest during the Nuremburg and associated trials.\u00a0 The richest jurisprudence has been developed by the ICTY and ICTR, and the new Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court draws from it and adds to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Just a word about the elements of crimes against humanity and why I referred to 1988 as a textbook case.<\/p>\n

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A crime against humanity needs to be part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians.\u00a0 This element is intended to distinguish a crime against humanity from a random attack not part of a plan or policy.\u00a0 Widespread has meant an attack that is a \u201cmassive, frequent, large scale action, carried out collectively with considerable seriousness and directed against a multiplicity of victims.\u201d\u00a0 A systematic attack on the other hand, is a qualitative term, pointing to the organized nature of the act of violence and the improbability of its random occurrence.\u00a0 This requires a \u201cpattern or methodical plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The 1988 killings were almost certainly widespread.\u00a0 They were geographically dispersed across the country and the number of victims is in the thousands, though the exact magnitude is open to debate.\u00a0 And they were systematic.\u00a0 I will get to that shortly when I discuss the preconceived policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I also want to point out that that the attacks were against civilians.\u00a0 The Iranian government has exerted a great deal of effort trying to link the victims of that massacre to the Mojahedin\u2019s military action in 1988.\u00a0 That position is both factually and legally indefensible.\u00a0 Factually because the prisoners who had been in prison for many years had nothing to do with the attacks.\u00a0 They were far from the battlefield, were in no position to take part in spying or terrorist activities, and in the case of the prisoners not affiliated with the Mojahedin, did not even belong to a political party involved in battle.\u00a0 The assertion is also legally incorrect because the customary international law is increasingly that any person who has laid down his arms is considered a civilian for purposes of the definition of crimes against humanity.\u00a0 So, even assuming that some of the prisoners executed that summer were captured on the battlefield, they could not summarily be executed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The other important element of a crime against humanity is that it be part of a preconceived policy.\u00a0 There is some debate about the exact contours of this element.\u00a0 But, in the 1988 case, it is crystal clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In establishing that the 1988 murders were part of a preconceived policy, one needs to refer to the memoirs of Ayatollah Montazeri who has written with incredible clarity on the topic.\u00a0 He has indicated that the orders came from the very top, Khomeini himself and that many in the upper echelons of the government, like Mousavi Ardebili and Ahmad Khoemini were involved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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His writing corroborates much of what has been stated by former prisoners about the nature of the questioning and the arbitrary decision-making on whether a prisoner would live or die.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Who, then, is responsible for these crimes against humanity?\u00a0 I posit that we have 4 categories of culprits to think about when analyzing the 1988 executions.<\/p>\n

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The first group, obviously, is the executioners.\u00a0 The murderer who performs the unlawful act obviously bears criminal responsibility for it.\u00a0 Next in the hierarchy are those who directly ordered or prompted the executions, ranking immediately above the actual executioners.\u00a0 This category includes the judges on the Death Commission and the prison wardens who instigated the killings.\u00a0 Thanks to Montazeri, some of these figures are fairly well known to us:\u00a0 Nayyeri, Eshraghi, Pourmohammadi, Ebrahim Raisee and others.<\/p>\n

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At the top of the criminal hierarchy are those who participated in the planning of the crime.\u00a0 Montazeri is purposely vague on who these people are.\u00a0 He says that \u201csome people\u201d came to Khomeini and obtained a letter for executing the political prisoners.\u00a0 He never reveals who these people were.\u00a0 One needs to look to Khomeini\u2019s inner circle at that time to figure out who they were.<\/p>\n

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There is a fourth group who bears criminal responsibility for these crimes, and they may sometimes slip one\u2019s mind.\u00a0 These are government officials who didn\u2019t order the killings or conceive of the policy, but bear criminal responsibility under the doctrine of superior responsibility.\u00a0 These are individuals who (i) had effective command, control or authority over the perpetrators, (ii) who knew or had information that would allow them to conclude that crimes were being committed, and (iii) failed to take action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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This allows us to look up the chain of command, at people who may not have directly sat on the Death Commission, but who must surely have known of its existence and its gruesome activities.\u00a0 So, we look to see who headed up the intelligence ministry at that time and we find Mohmmad Rayshahri.\u00a0 Or we find Mousavi Ardebili as the chief justice of Iran\u2019s courts, or Ismail Shooshtari as head of Iran\u2019s prisons, or Mousavi-Kheiniha (later the \u201creformist\u201d publisher of Salam<\/em>) as Iran\u2019s Prosecutor General, and Khamenei as Iran\u2019s president.<\/p>\n

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In the Iranian context, this \u201csuperior responsibility\u201d doctrine is not without its problems.\u00a0 In Iran\u2019s chaotic power structure, it is not always clear who has effective control over whom.\u00a0 As I mentioned, mere knowledge of a crime is not enough.\u00a0 There has to be effective command, control or authority.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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***<\/p>\n

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Having addressed what happened and what it all means under international law, I also want to address briefly what it is we should be doing and what political and legal challenges lie ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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When thinking about the political challenges involved in the pursuit of accountability in the 1988 case, and when thinking about why no one has seriously taken up an investigation of the case, there is an uncomfortable truth to which many in the human rights community will not admit.\u00a0 But it\u2019s the giant elephant in the room, so it doesn\u2019t make sense not to address it.\u00a0 I think a primary political problem in addressing the issue is that the majority of victims of the massacre belonged to a political group that is now looked upon unfavorably by a lot of human rights organizations and by a great many opinion makers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t want to delve into a discussion of the arguments for or against the Mojahedin, their ideology, tactics, leadership, etc\u2026\u00a0 But, looking strategically at the project of obtaining justice, one will immediately recognize that the victims are not viewed in the most sympathetic light.\u00a0 Those who want to keep this story buried will always point to the fact that the Mojahedin have been designated by a number of countries as a terrorist group, though we are beginning to see some change in that.\u00a0 They will point to the fact that the group had bases in Iraq for a number of years.\u00a0 They will point to the fact that human rights groups have severely criticized the organization\u2019s own human rights practices and its \u201ccult\u201d behavior.\u00a0 As I said, I don\u2019t want to get into the merits of those arguments.\u00a0 But we all know that they have salience.\u00a0 We all know that the unpopularity of the victims has something to do with the fact that the world has been silent for too long.<\/p>\n

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A second political or, better yet, strategic problem, is that so many of the facts of this case are shrouded in complete mystery.\u00a0 It\u2019s so difficult to provide a complete narrative of the crimes of that summer when one does not even know how many people were killed and who, exactly, ordered their killing.\u00a0 The story of 1988 is an incredible story.\u00a0 But it\u2019s an incredible story with significant gaps in it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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A third political problem to point to is that the world\u2019s attention, at the moment, is not focused on the human rights issue in Iran.\u00a0 Rather, all attention is almost exclusively on the nuclear issue, Iran\u2019s sponsorship of insurgent in Iraq, Iran\u2019s connections to Hezbollah, etc…\u00a0 It is hard to get the world to care about a crime that happened virtually in secret that no one has really talked about for 20 years.\u00a0 There is a corollary problem here, and that is that it often seems like the wrong<\/em> people are paying attention to human rights issues.\u00a0 There seems to be a real fear in the human rights community \u2013 some warranted and some, frankly, representative of a certain moral cowardice in my humble opinion \u2013 to engage with human rights issues in Iran for fear that neo-cons would latch on that discussion and use it as a pre-text for war.\u00a0 I know, from personal experience and discussions, that a number of human rights groups and high-profile academics are reluctant to engage with the issue lest they feed into the so-called imperial project of the US government.<\/p>\n

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On the legal front, there is also no shortage of problems.\u00a0 You know, the last few weeks have been exciting for those of us who care about international human rights and international legal mechanisms to address them.\u00a0 The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has sought to indict Sudan\u2019s Omar al-Bashir.\u00a0 Radovan Karadzic has been caught and handed over to the ICTY at the Hague.\u00a0 But in the Iran case, it is not immediately obvious what institution can really be called upon to try anyone guilty of these crimes.\u00a0 The Iranian courts are obviously not part of the solution.\u00a0 They are, in fact, very much part of the problem.\u00a0 They are complicit in much of the repression of the Iranian government against Iranian citizens.<\/p>\n

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The ICC lacks the jurisdiction to try this case.\u00a0 It lacks both temporal and territorial jurisdiction to investigate the issue.\u00a0 There is no special UN-mandated court such as the ICTY or ICTR to try these cases.\u00a0 And national courts are often very reluctant to use notions of universal jurisdiction to try people for crimes that do not have any link to any other country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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And even if there was a court, we don\u2019t yet have adequate evidence.\u00a0 We still don\u2019t know how many were killed.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know who orchestrated their killing.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know who has effective command in the Iranian power structure to establish a theory of superior responsibility.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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All of this talk of obstacles may lead activists and lawyers and former prisoners and people interested in justice to despair.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think that is called for.\u00a0 If anything, all the problems I listed should propel us to act.\u00a0\u00a0 And when I say we need to act, I mean that we must do more than simply come together every year to commemorate<\/em> the events.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong.\u00a0 Commemorations are important.\u00a0 Observing moment of silence is important.\u00a0 Laying flowers and singing songs are important.\u00a0 But they are only a beginning.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What we need now, more than ever, is for a group to come together to actually spearhead a demand for accountability.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To combat the problem I alluded to earlier about the unpopularity of victims, such a group needs to ensure that its campaign for justice is non-political and independent of any partisan leanings.\u00a0 This must not be a campaign to support this or that party.\u00a0 It must be a movement that stays above partisan frays; it must be a movement that argues that demanding justice and accountability is important to all Iranians, not just those with ties to particular parties.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such a group needs to publicize what happened in 1988 and let people in the world, particularly policy makers, know about it.\u00a0 Such a group needs to also shift focus onto the massacre by linking it to what we see in Iran today.\u00a0 We have a government that is utterly unresponsive to its people and their demands, that continues to repress, torture and kill its own people, that acts irresponsibly on the international stage.\u00a0 It does all these things because there is an entrenched culture of impunity.\u00a0 It does these things because people who carry out horrible acts, as they did in 1988, walk free and, in fact, get promoted.\u00a0 It does those things because it has, so far, been accountable to no one.\u00a0 So, it\u2019s important that we draw the link between the culture of impunity in Iran and the Iranian government\u2019s current appalling behavior at home and abroad.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And such a group needs to begin the tough task of gathering evidence.\u00a0 There are already human rights documentation centers that do this kind of work, both here in Europe and at various centers in North America.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the groups don\u2019t communicate effectively and, as a result, don\u2019t proceed efficiently.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A group focusing on 1988 needs to partner with them and gather the evidence before it has been lost.\u00a0 It needs to gather testimony before memories have faded and people have died.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And such a group needs to create alliances with other communities who have also been in similar situations.\u00a0 I always mention the Chileans and the Argentinians as examples;\u00a0 Communities that saw their military leaders wreak havoc on the country.\u00a0 But the human rights activists continued to work tirelessly, bravely and creatively and have had some notable successes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I sometimes despair about our prospects for success.\u00a0 But then I see Radovan Karadzic in the defendant\u2019s box.\u00a0 I see Charles Taylor being tried.\u00a0 I remeber Slobodan Milosovic being tried. I remember that Augusto Pinochet\u2019s last days were spent in fear of prosecution.\u00a0 I remember that each of these people was thought invincible, but was eventually brought to justice.\u00a0 And when I remember that, I am encouraged again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A campaign for accountability in the 1988 case requires a serious and sustained effort.\u00a0 It needs people from all walks of life.\u00a0 As I said at the outset, 20 years from now, I hope that we can say that we struggled and eventually won victories in the cause of justice and accountability.\u00a0 I hope that we do not gather to lament our failure to act.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty Years of Silence: A Legal and Political Analysis of the Demand for Accountability \u00a0 Kaveh Shahrooz, Lawyer based in New York.\u00a0 Graduate of Harvard Law School. Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. \u00a0 \u00a0 Stockholm, Sweden. \u00a0 \u00a0 August 22, 2008 \u00a0 \u00a0 Good afternoon. \u00a0 \u00a0 Before I begin, I want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7255,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7253"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9059,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions\/9059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanoon-zendanian.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}