On Friday, March 14—the final Friday of the Iranian calendar year—families of political prisoners executed in the 1980s gathered behind closed doors at Khavaran Cemetery to hold a commemoration ceremony. The event took place under severe restrictions imposed by Iranian regime’s security forces, who have kept the cemetery gates closed for over a year, preventing families from paying tribute to their loved ones.
For years, the families of those executed in the 1980s have faced systematic obstruction by the Iranian regime’s authorities. Most recently, they have protested the burial of deceased members of the Baha’i community in the section of Khavaran Cemetery that contains mass graves of political prisoners executed in the summer of 1988. The Baha’i community has also joined these protests, denouncing the practice as part of a broader effort to erase historical evidence of the mass executions.
The families of the executed prisoners argue that the Iranian regime’s actions are a deliberate attempt to conceal the atrocities committed during that period. In the summer of 1988, Iranian regime authorities executed approximately 30,000 political prisoners, the majority of whom were affiliated with the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), within a span of weeks.
There have been numerous reports over the years of Iranian regime security forces preventing families from entering Khavaran Cemetery to hold memorial ceremonies. Iranian regime has long barred access to the site while simultaneously using it to forcibly bury deceased Baha’i citizens, a move condemned by human rights advocates as an attempt to obscure the massacre’s legacy.
Khavaran Cemetery, located in southeastern Tehran along Khavaran Road and adjacent to cemeteries of religious minorities, serves as the burial site for thousands of political and ideological prisoners who were executed in 1988. These individuals were secretly buried in mass graves without identification, leaving their families without a proper place to mourn.
The mass executions of August and September 1988 remain one of the darkest chapters in Iran’s recent history. Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian regime’s former president, played a direct role in these events as a key member of the infamous “Death Commission”—a five-member panel responsible for conducting rapid trials that lasted mere minutes before sentencing prisoners to execution.
Thirty-six years later, on July 22, 2024, on the eve of this bloody anniversary, the UN Human Rights Center issued a statement in Geneva in which it announced that Professor Javaid Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in “Iran – in final findings before his mandate ends on 31 July – said that the “atrocity crimes” of summary, arbitrary and extra-judicial executions during 1981-1982 and in 1988 amounted to crimes against humanity of murder and extermination, as well as genocide. The executions included women – some reportedly raped before being executed – and many children. Crimes against humanity also included imprisonment, torture, and enforced disappearances.”
