On October 30, 2014, Iranian intellectual Mohammad Maleki, a
former president of Tehran University and a critic of the Iranian regime,
published an open letter to the people of Iran in the online daily
Roozonline.com. In the letter, he wondered why U.S. and European leaders are
shocked by ISIS' beheadings yet ignore the brutal crimes that the Iranian
regime has been committing ever since its establishment against its own people
and the people of the region. Maleki argued that the Iranian regime, under its
founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor Ali Khamenei – who
are the Iranian equivalents of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi – is the same
as ISIS because it too executes people systematically and brutally violates the
human rights of many prisoners. Maleki pointed to the mass killing of Iranian
prisoners, especially of militants from the oppositionist Mojahedeen-e Khalq
organization who were sentenced during the 1980s in disregard for their rights
and subjected to physical and psychological torture. He claimed that the West
even helped the Iranian regime by giving it a free hand in Iraq after Saddam
Hussein’s ouster and letting it act against Iranian oppositionists there, in
collaboration with then-Iraqi president Nouri Al-Maliki, who is an Iranian
lackey.
The 81-year-old Maleki, who lives in Iran, is a member of the
anti-regime National-Religious Coalition of Iran and a columnist for the
reformist daily Rooz. He served as Tehran University’s first
president following the Islamic Revolution and spent five years in prison for
opposing the purge of the universities conducted by Khomeini as part of his
cultural revolution. In 2001, he was detained for half a year on a charge of
anti-regime subversion, and in 2009 he was arrested after protesting electoral
fraud in the presidential elections and was charged with insulting Khomeini and
Khamenei. In January 2012 he was again arrested briefly for conducting
anti-regime propaganda.
In November 2012, Maleki published a letter accusing Khamenei of
suppressing society and systematically murdering his critics and opponents, and
held him responsible for the regime’s massacre of thousands of its citizens. He
called on him to step down before a popular uprising broke out against him, and
thus to spare Iran the kind of bloodshed that Syria and Libya have experienced.[1]
Below are the main points of his letter from October 2014:[2]
"The whole world is currently talking about ISIS (the
Islamic Caliphate) and its crimes. The talk and the articles about the acts of
slaughter and other attacks perpetrated by these murderers against Muslims take
me back 30-something years and remind me of events that happened in Evin
[prison], Ghazal Hasar [prison] and other prisons in Iran under Khomeini’s and
Khamenei’s rule.
"I am writing you to improve your familiarity with the
character of the founders of the current [regime] – [a regime] that resembles
ISIS. No man of honor [who supports] humanitarianism and freedom can condone
the actions of those who call themselves ISIS or fail to despise what they do.
[But] let me present you with examples of some [actions] that were carried out
in Iran over the last 30 years by the regime of the Rule [of the Jurisprudent]
and on the orders of the Iranian "Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi," in order to
reveal [only] a drop in the ocean of crimes that were committed against the
people of our homeland and to expose the essence of those currently portraying
themselves as ISIS's opponents. …
"For years, Ghazal Hasar [prison] was the place where
prisoners were sent to serve their sentence after they were arrested,
interrogated and tortured in unimaginable ways and then placed on trial (before
illegal tribunals and without the presence of an attorney and the right of
defense, in proceedings that generally last only a few minutes). The charges
against these people did not justify their execution, [so] they were condemned
to life imprisonment or many years of jail time. [But] most of the prisoners in
Evin prison and the other prisons were [nevertheless] tortured to death or
executed. Tens of thousands of people were executed in Evin prison during the
1980s and especially in 1988.[3] The prisoners at Ghazal Hasar were
those who escaped Evin alive…
"[The atrocities committed in Evin and Ghazal Hasar
prisons] created huge and terrible problems. One of the facilities, for
example, now houses 400 insane women and young girls whom they don’t know what
to do with. It is impossible to release them and it is impossible to keep them
there. Most of these women are products of the actions committed by [people
like] Hajj Davoud [a regime official in charge of prisons] using [torture
chambers known as] "Judgment Day," "the grave," "the
cage"and "the housing unit," which Hajj Davoud created to make
prisoners renounce their past…
"Given all these crimes that take place in Iran, Iraq,
Syria and other places worldwide, why do America and Europe remain silent or
make do with perfunctory condemnations? Why is it that, when a gang of Boko
Haram founders savagely kidnapped 270 women and girls in Nigeria, not a single
American or European plane, manned or unmanned, performed a single
serious action to rescue them, and [America and Europe] sufficed with a verbal
condemnation of the abduction? But when two Americans and one or two Europeans
are beheaded by ISIS (a most cruel act), the entire world must unite against
ISIS’ crimes. Why didn’t [the U.S. and Europe] consider doing the same when the
Americans offered Iraq to Iran on a silver platter… and Iran, in collaboration
with [Nouri] Al-Maliki and his associates, persecuted the Iraqi people and
those Iranians who had found shelter in Iraq [i.e. members of Mojahedeen-e
Khalq]?
"Unfortunately, Iran’s current rulers are intervening [in
the affairs] of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, plunging them into disorder,
insecurity and war. At a time that the Iranian nation and the region’s nations
suffer from poverty and corruption, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and Ali Khamenei both
purport to rule the Islamic world and thereby drag the region into fire and
blood. Sincerely, what is the difference between ISIS and the Islamic Republic
regime?"
Endnotes:
[1] See MEMRI
Special Dispatch No.5095, ²Iranian Intellectual
Accuses Khamenei Of Systematic Murder Of His Opponents And Leadership Failure:
'Quit, [Or] Tomorrow It'll Be Your Turn!',² December 17, 2012.
[3] According to
Mojahedeen-e Khalq, in 1988-1989 tens of thousands of its members were executed
in Iranian prisons on Khomeini's orders.
