Audio file revives calls for inquiry into massacre of Iran political prisoners

  The biggest crimes in Iran has been committed by the government

The Guardian, 11 August 2016 - The publication for the first time in Iran of an audio recording from nearly three decades ago has reopened old wounds from the darkest period in the Islamic Republic.
In the summer of 1988, thousands of supporters of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization were executed in a massacre of political prisoners. In the pre-internet age, the incident was subject to a media blackout in Iran and received scant attention abroad, unlike other acts of carnage that rank alongside it, such as Srebrenica.
Only one senior Iranian official dared to speak out at the time: Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who was in line to lead the country after Khomeini, then supreme leader and the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Montazeri wrote a number of letters to Khomeini condemning the executions, and the grand ayatollah soon fell out of favour. He was later placed under house arrest and faced huge restrictions until his death in December 2009.
This week, on the 28th anniversary of that bleak summer, Montazeri’s official website, run by his family and followers, published an audio file from a meeting he held in 1988 with senior judges and judiciary officials involved in the mass executions.
In an extraordinarily blunt manner, Montazeri is heard telling his audience, among them the sharia judge and public prosecutors, “In my view, the biggest crime in the Islamic Republic, for which the history will condemn us, has been committed at your hands, and they’ll write your names as criminals in the history.”
The 1988 mass execution is believed to have started after the MEK forces launched a military incursion against Iranian forces

In the audio recording, Montazeri tells his audience that he believes the authorities had a plan to execute political prisoners for a few years and found a good excuse in the wake of the incursion.
The ayatollah says he felt compelled to speak out because otherwise he would not have an answer on the “judgment day”. “I haven’t been able to sleep and every night it occupies my mind for two to three hours … what do you have to tell to the families?”