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This picture is part of Prison Memoir in Painting by Iranian artist Soudabeh Ardavan. She
spent eight years in Iranian prisons and survived the 1988 massacre. She
painted this and many other prison's paintings by using her hair as a brush and
toothpaste or tea as paint. She now lives in exile in Sweden.
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A
People’s Tribunal will sit at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London on
June 18-22 to unearth secrets the Iranian regime have managed to keep buried
for more than two decades. Survivors of torture and families of
murder victims have managed against all odds to set up this international court
to investigate the Iranian regime’s biggest state crime.
“When
they took me to the death committee in Gohardasht prison, the lobby was piled
high with sandals, glasses and blindfolds. That’s all that was left of our
friends. They are all gone and I am alive. I am alive to tell their story.
That’s my only goal,” says Mehdi Aslani, 53, who survived a mass massacre of
political prisoners in Iran the summer of 1988.
Aslani
and thousands of other victims have waited 24 years for this, but now they will
finally have their day in court.
“The
Tribunal’s main purpose is allowing evidence to be heard and allowing the world
to find out what really happened in the 1980s in Iran,” says John Cooper, QC,
chair of the Iran Tribunal’s steering committee. “It is incredible that torture
survivors and families of murder victims have managed to achieve this on their
own - and it is shocking they had to do this all on their own – that the UN did
nothing.”
In the
summer of 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran executed in secret an estimated
5000 political prisoners across the country. The killing, ordered by an
extraordinary fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini himself, was relentless and
efficient. Prisoners, including women and teenagers, were loaded on forklift
trucks and hanged from cranes and beams in groups of five or six at a time in
half-hourly intervals all day-long. The victims were intellectuals, students,
leftists, members of opposition parties and ethnic and religious minorities.
Many were jailed for no more than distributing leaflets, having a banned book
or being accused by “a trusted friend of the regime,” according to Amnesty
International.
The
massacre was the climax of a massive elimination campaign conducted by the
regime from 1981 to 1989: during that bloody decade around 20,000 political
prisoners were executed across Iran.
“It is
what I would term (based on my past work with the UN in Bosnia) ‘Iran’s
Srebrenica’: a monumental atrocity that cannot remain unanswered,” says Payam Akhavan, professor of International Law at McGill University, first UN war
crime prosecutor at The Hague and member of the Iran Tribunal.
The
deliberate and systematic manner in which these executions took place
constitutes a crime against humanity under international law, according to many
human rights lawyers. (Widespread and systematic executions of a civilian
population across the country, planned and ordered by the highest ranks of the
Iranian government.)
Yet, to
date, more than two decades after the massacre, there are still no
investigation into this crime, no international pressure on the Iranian
government to do so, and no recognition from Iran or the international
community. In fact, many of the perpetrators are still in power and the
international media seem to deliberately avoid covering this issue.
Over the past decades, survivors and families of the
victims – many are mothers because the majority of the victims were very young
- have campaigned for justice.
They have sent petitions to the UN, organized rallies and seminars and
disseminated information on the Internet – but no one is listening.
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| After the massacre/ Soudabeth Ardavan |
“We are in the information age: with a click of a mouse,
you can know what is happening in the far corners of the world. Yet more than
5,000 people were killed in two months in Iran and no one knows about it. It’s
like nothing happened,” says Aslani, who lives in exile in Germany.
So the
survivors and families of the victims have taken the matter into their own
hands. In 2007, they have come together to form the Iran Tribunal,
modeled on the Russell Tribunal set up by British philosopher Bertrand Russelland French writer Jean-Paul Sartre in 1966 to examine American intervention in
Vietnam, and the subsequent Russell Tribunals on Chile, Iraq and Argentine.
Like these tribunals, the Iran Tribunal won’t have any legal status, but will
act as a tribunal of conscience to deal with violations of international law
that have not been recognized nor dealt with by existing international
jurisdictions.
After
five years of fundraising, outreach and assembling a team of prominent lawyers,
the People’s Tribunal is now ready to proceed. It is organized in two parts: a
Truth Commission and a Tribunal.
The Truth Commission, during which the court will hear and examine oral
and written evidence from dozens of witnesses, is held at AI’s headquarters in
London on June 18-22. The Tribunal
will then meet on October 25-27 in The Hague to issue a verdict.
Attendance is free, but you need to register. For more information, click here. To follow the proceedings live, click here.
