The 1988 prison massacre (کشتار زندانیان سیاسی ۱۳۶۷) is the killing of political prisoners inside the prisons of the Islamic Republic in the summer and autumn of 1988, on a written order from Ruhollah Khomeini. The people put to death were already in custody. They were political prisoners, not captives from the Mersad fighting. Many had been tried years earlier. Some had a reduced sentence, or a pardon, written on the file, and were killed without a new act. A main part of the killing, after the first wave, was communists and Marxists who would not pray, would not sign a paper of faith, and would not renounce their organizations.

The order

In early Mordad 1367, after the Mojahedin-e Khalq attack that the organization called Forough-e Javidan and the regime called Mersad, Khomeini wrote that mercy toward people he classed as waging war on God was simple-mindedness, and that the men assigned to decide the cases should not hesitate. The order named Hossein-Ali Nayyeri, then a sharia judge, Morteza Eshraghi, then prosecutor, and a representative of the Ministry of Intelligence. Families and survivors call the panels that then sat in the prisons the death commission, هیئت مرگ.¹

The first wave, in early Mordad, killed members and supporters of the Mojahedin who were already in prison. The second wave was the left. Morad Vaisi, on Radio Farda, dates the new interrogations of leftist prisoners to 5 Shahrivar 1367 and the hangings to 6 or 7 Shahrivar, with most of that wave in Shahrivar and some of it running on for months. He names the groups those prisoners belonged to: the People's Fadaiyan guerrillas, the Fadaiyan Majority, the Tudeh Party of Iran, Rah-e Kargar, Peykar, Komala, the Communist Party of Iran, and smaller Marxist organizations.²

Survivors of that second wave told BBC Persian that the panel treated them as apostates. The three questions were whether the prisoner was a Muslim, whether they prayed, and whether they renounced their organization.¹ Radio Farda's longer list adds belief in God, in heaven and hell, and in Muhammad as the seal of the prophets, plus fasting, reading the Quran, and whether the prisoner would sign a paper of faith in God, the Prophet, the Quran, and the resurrection. One question asked whether they had grown up in a house where their father prayed, fasted, and read the Quran. Vaisi reported that, as the interrogators ran it, a single answer they counted as wrong was enough for execution. A communist or a Marxist who would not pray, would not sign, and would not disown their group was not given a plea that let them live.²

Hossein-Ali Montazeri, then Khomeini's designated successor, said a separate order for the communist prisoners had been taken from Khomeini after Nayyeri wrote to him. The justification he recorded was that the religious prisoners had been executed, so what was to be done with the communists. On the recording of 9 Dey 1367 he says Ali Khamenei, then president, told him he had argued with Nayyeri, and that Khamenei believed the order against the leftists followed that letter. Nayyeri was in the room and did not deny the account. In the memoir Montazeri also wrote that he did not know whether Khamenei had been uninformed or had spoken that way only to him.¹

What Montazeri told the panel

After he learned of the killings, Montazeri wrote two letters to Khomeini asking that they stop. On 24 Mordad 1367 (15 August 1988) he met Nayyeri, Eshraghi, Ebrahim Raisi, then deputy prosecutor, and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, then the Intelligence Ministry's representative at Evin. The meeting is appendix 155 of his memoirs. His office published the unedited audio on 19 Mordad 1395. The next day the Intelligence Office in Qom told his son Ahmad to take the file off the site.³

On that recording he called the killings the greatest crime committed in the Islamic Republic from the start of the revolution until that day, said it had been done by their hands, and said history would write their names among the criminals.⁴

Pourmohammadi was not at the second meeting, on 9 Dey 1367. Montazeri told Nayyeri, Eshraghi, and Raisi that they had killed three thousand people, "for example," and that velayat-e faqih had become revolting in people's eyes. He said prisoners already pardoned, with the agreement of Khomeini, the Intelligence Ministry, the prosecutor's office, and the Supreme Judicial Council, had been executed. He told them that after Mersad the Mojahedin had taken a large defeat, and that killing the prisoners had revived the group abroad. He also said he had a religious doubt about the execution of women and girls.¹

BBC Persian, citing his memoirs, records his figure for the prison dead as between 2,800 and 3,800. He later put the number above 3,800. Both are his estimates, not a name-by-name roll.⁵¹

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told the Majlis in the middle of the winter of 1367 that the number of prisoners executed in the previous few months was under 1,000. That is the figure the government was willing to say in public. Montazeri's estimate and the named file below are separate counts.¹

Khomeini removed Montazeri as successor on 6 Farvardin 1368, after a letter of his against the executions leaked, and without a session of the Assembly of Experts. Khamenei later wrote that, on the jurisprudence and on the Imam's diagnosis, conduct, and opinion, there was no cause for unease. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, prime minister at the time of the killings, said in a recording in 1388 that in a meeting of the heads of the branches Khamenei's view had been that this was like black water poured on the system, blackening all of them.¹

The graves

The bodies were not given back. Families were told, when a bag of belongings was handed over, that their child had been killed and that they should not come again for visits. Many of the dead of that summer were buried in unmarked mass graves at Khavaran, in southeast Tehran, wrapped in black plastic with too little soil to cover them. Khavaran is not the only such ground. Bahareh Monshi, whose father Abbas Monshi Roudsari was killed that summer, told IranWire that other mass graves are in Tehran, Kurdistan, Ahvaz, Lorestan, Tabriz, and Gilan, and that families from across the country still gather at Khavaran on the anniversary and on the last Thursdays of the year, when they are let in.⁶

Monshi's father was serving a six-year sentence and was due for release in Esfand 1371. In a Nowruz 1367 letter he told her mother he would come with the spring and put a crown of violets on their heads. He was killed at night, and the family was not told where he was buried. They learned of new trenches at Khavaran from families of people executed in earlier years, not from the state. Ladan Bazargan, whose brother Bijan Bazargan was killed the same summer, told the same reporter that in 1367 neighbors did not come to condole, notices could not be put on the wall, and there was no place to mourn. The state has since driven machinery over the political graves at Khavaran, pulled up trees the families planted, and at times closed the gate.⁶

What the press did with it

The killings were kept off the Iranian papers. Radio Farda records that the state never published an official document of these executions and did not accept that they had happened. Families could not put up a notice or hold a mourning.²⁶

Ervand Abrahamian wrote in Tortured Confessions (1999) that the curtain of secrecy around the executions was so effective that no Western journalist had heard of the massacre and no Western academic had discussed it. Kaveh Shahrooz, in the Harvard Human Rights Journal in 2007, quoted that line and wrote that the English-language news reports he could find still numbered no more than ten or fifteen. He also quoted Joe Stork, then of Human Rights Watch, in the Toronto Star of 5 September 2004: at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Stork said, the major powers had an interest in not stirring the pot and not antagonizing Iran.⁷

Montazeri, on the 9 Dey 1367 recording, told the panel that foreign radios were already turning the climate against the state. That radio noise was not a newsroom account of who was hanged, in which prison, or for refusing to pray and to sign. The massacre of these political prisoners, communists and Marxists among them, stayed off the pages that were covering the ceasefire.¹

This archive

This archive's named file, taken from the Omid memorial of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, lists Iranian nationals recorded there as executed from 1 July through 31 December 1988. It holds 2,199 names. August has 1,079 of the lines, September 453, November 288, October 171, December 123, and July 85. The recorded method is hanging for 1,044, shooting for 899, an unspecified execution for 246, another execution method for 8, and death in custody for 2. Tehran Province is the place on 1,223 lines. Ten lines name no city. 210 of the names have a portrait, and those portraits are filed in this catalog under 1988 prison massacre. The other 1,989 are names without a photograph. This half-year list is a named file for that window. It sits beside Montazeri's estimate and beside Rafsanjani's public figure of under one thousand, and it counts only names the memorial had recorded when the file was taken.⁸

The aim of this archive is to complete that list: to keep adding names from the 1988 prison massacre, with a portrait where one can be found, until the people killed in this event are covered here by name.