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On May 19, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi attended a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the Azerbaijan-Iran border.Iranian Presidential Palace/WANA/Reuters
Samira Mohidin is a journalist, genocide researcher, and host and producer of the podcast Gay Girl Gone.
The announcement of Ebrahim Raisi's death was as long as the list of those he was sent to hang some 40 years ago.
Iranian President Raisi has been declared dead 16 hours after his helicopter crashed in the jungle in eastern Iran's Azerbaijan region. And for the many Iranian families whose lives were destroyed by the actions of the man nicknamed “The Butcher of Tehran,” there will be no tears, but perhaps some regret.
In July 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, issued a decree emptying Iran's political prisons. At the time, Raisi was 27 years old and had already been promoted to deputy prosecutor in Tehran. And with his death that summer, he proved his unwavering loyalty to the Iranian regime.
Together with three others, he formed a “Death Committee” that carried out Khomeini's orders with lightning speed. Prisoners were questioned about their loyalty to the country and to Islam. Trials lasted between two and five minutes. Those deemed disloyal were immediately taken to the prison yard and hanged en masse.
Approximately 5,000 prisoners, many of them teenagers, were systematically executed. Every year, their families gather at one of the mass graves to mourn their loved ones. Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the Iranian government has since tried to cover up and wall off one of these sites, the Habaran cemetery, where hundreds of dissidents are believed to be buried. It revealed that.
The Spanish Inquisition had Tomás de Torquemada. The Islamic Republic had Mr. Raisi.
Canada was the first country to officially recognize this bloody period in Iranian history as a crime against humanity, and remains the only country to do so to this day. On June 5, 2013, government and opposition members came together to approve the New Democratic Party's proposal, proposed by the late Paul Dewar, to unanimously recognize the massacre of thousands of Iranian political prisoners as a violation of international human rights law. Seconded the motion.
The document, adopted by parliament, “condemns the mass killings of political prisoners carried out in Iran in the summer of 1988 as crimes against humanity, and condemns the victims buried in mass graves in Habaran Cemetery and elsewhere in Iran.'' It also designated September 1st as a day of solidarity with Iranian political prisoners.
The future of the Middle East darkens with the death of the Iranian president, war crimes warrants requested against Prime Minister Netanyahu and others, etc.
The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi could affect Iranian politics for decades to come
But this won't be the last time the country does business with Tehran's butchers. As Iran's attorney general at the time, he was appointed by the Iranian government to lead the investigation into the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, which killed 55 Canadian citizens, 30 permanent residents, and all 176 passengers and crew on board. did. Another 53 people traveled to Canada via Kiev.
Many people, including Canada's prominent United Nations prosecutor Payam Akhawan, said they were surprised Raisi would lead the investigation and said he should stand trial himself. Raisi's investigation will ultimately exonerate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of any wrongdoing, adding another dark chapter to Iran's bloody history.
And although his criminal activities dragged on again, he ran for Iran's presidential election in 2021 and won. Mr. Raisi was asked about his involvement in the massacre of political prisoners at his first press conference as president. Instead of following the Iranian government's official line of denying the incident, he broke protocol and said he was proud of his actions and was “defending the country from its enemies.”
In January 2022, a group of United Nations judges and investigators called for an official investigation into Raisi's involvement in the massacre of Iranian political prisoners. That never happened. Instead, Raisi was at the helm of the government during the 2022 and 2023 Martha Amini uprisings, when Iranian security forces killed more than 500 protesters in the streets, and his brutal past has been I was able to turn this into a prelude to my presidency.
And despite having blood on his hands, he was widely expected to continue to emerge as a possible successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the Islamic Republic.
Raisi's ultimate fate was to end up in a prisoner's box in a courtroom. But instead, it was encased in the burnt metal of a helicopter. May the ghosts of the thousands of innocents he sent to the gallows haunt him forever.
