London, 2 September – US General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, writing in The Washington Times yesterday, said that the “brutality” that lay behind the Iranian regime’s 1988 execution of 30,000 was “alive and well” in a government “now portrayed as being run by moderates.”
The killings, he said, in which members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK) were the primary victims, represented, “the biggest massacre of political prisoners since World War II.”
General Shelton notes that the force of Montazeri’s words is all the greater for his having been an insider, in fact, Khomeini’s chosen successor. Montazeri told the “Death Commission”: “mass executions without trials…over time will favor them, and the world will condemn us and they will be even more encouraged in their resistance. Killing is the wrong way to resist against a thought, an idea.”
“We will not be in power forever. In the future, history will judge us,” Montazeri said.
General Shelton calls for justice for the 30,000: “The members of the “Death Commission” are now serving in senior positions within the so-called moderate government of Hassan Rouhani.”
Hossein-Ali Nayyeri is the current head of the Supreme Disciplinary Court for Judges. Ebrahim Raeesi has recently been appointed as the head of the Astan Quds-e Razavi foundation, which is one of the most important political and economic powerhouses in the clerical regime.
Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi is the Justice Minister in Mr. Rouhani’s Cabinet.
“These mass murderers’ current positions aren’t just an insult to those Iranians who paid the ultimate price in 1988; they are also a death sentence for innocent Iranians today, and a warning of the intentions of the Rouhani government abroad,” said General Shelton.
Illustrating the continuation of the “brutality,” he points to the “no less than 2,600 people” executed under Rouhani; “Religious and ethnic minorities number disproportionately among the several thousand perceived opponents who have been hung from cranes over the past few years.”
Abroad, the regime’s behaviour is no less brutal, General Shelton said: ” In Syria, Iraq and beyond, Iranian meddling and direct action supports despots such as Bashar Assad and suffering and death on a massive scale.”
