Four Decades of Forced Disappearances: An Iranian Saga

Fresh concerns about the fate of Hedayat Abdollahpour, an Iranian Kurd arrested by authorities back in 2016, have once again sparked discussion among human rights advocates on how to end the agony of the families of the victims of forced disappearances. This repressive tactic, which causes untold damage not just to those directly affected but the fabric of society as a whole, has been part and parcel of Iranian collective experience since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Amnesty International describes forced disappearance as a crime “frequently used as a strategy to spread terror within society. The feeling of insecurity and fear it generates is not limited to the close relatives of the disappeared, but also affects communities and society as a whole.”

The victims are picked indiscriminately: women and men who go out to join street protests and never return home, political prisoners whose manner of death and their resting place is shrouded in mystery, and dissidents – or simply, those in the “wrong” line of work such as journalists and lawyers – who are been illegally abducted and vanish, with no-one accepting responsibility for their fate.

The first time, the UN General Assembly paid attention to the issue of forced disappearances was in 1978. That year, the UN passed a resolution requesting its Commission on Human Rights to consider the issue. It was not until 2010 that an  International Convention  for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance came into effect.

Human rights organizations agree that this is ongoing fight. Constant vigilance is necessary, as the following heart-rending stories from the Islamic Republic show.

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On June 11 this year, Hedayat Abdollahpour’s father Abu-Bakr told IranWire was told by Urmia's Revolutionary Court that his son had been executed in late May. But as he relayed to IranWire on June 12, the authorities would now not tell him where his child had been buried.

“The Iranian authorities must urgently clarify the fate and whereabouts of Hedayat Abdollahpour, a Kurdish prisoner, after local authorities told his family that he had recently been secretly executed”, Amnesty International asserted on June 11.

This was the Amnesty’s second statement about Abdollahpour in a matter of weeks. The first had been issued on May 12, after political prisoners at Urmia’s Central Prison in West Azerbaijan province reported that Abdollahpour and two other political prisoners on death row had been transferred to an unknown location. Amnesty International demanded that Iranian authorities immediately reveal the fate and whereabouts of these prisoners.

In an interview with IranWire, Raha Bahreini, an Iranian-Canadian human rights lawyer and Amnesty International's researcher on Iran, said that the refusal of Iranian officials to reveal the truth about Hedayat Abdollahpour was a perfect example of forced disappearance. This is a crime under international law, and an ongoing one for as long as what happened to him – and where he is now – is made clear.

 

It Started a Long Time Ago

A significant number of political prisoners who perished in the mass executions of the 1980s can also be categorized as victims of forced disappearances. They are thought to have ben buried in secret in 30 mass graves across Iran.

Hajieh Ghaedi, the mother of Mohammad Sadegh and Mohammad Javad Ghaedi, has never learned how his two sons and her daughter-in-law died. After trying long and hard, the family were able to recover the body of Mohammad Sadegh, who had been executed in 1982, and inter him properly him in a burial plot that Hajieh had paid for. But the bodies of Mohammad Javad and her daughter-in-law were never found.

“They told my mother that Mohammad Javad had been sent to hell,” his sister Mercedeh Ghaedi told IranWire. “Nothing was known about his grave and we could not learn how he died. Khavaran Cemetery [one of the mass graves in eastern Tehran] was her only hold on life. She visited the graveyard as long as she was able to walk. She wanted to know how her loved ones lived in the last minutes of their lives, and why they were denied life, but no-one gave her any answers.”

 

Disappearing Into the Dark

There are also many in Iran who do not have the slightest idea whether their children are dead or alive. The name of Saeed Zeinali, who disappeared in 1991 shortly after being arrested, appears on the UN’s register of forced disappearances. His mother, Akram Neghabi, has been tirelessly searching for the fate of her son for 21 years and is well-known among human rights organizations. She has been warned repeatedly that she must stop her inquiries.

“Years have gone by and the fate of Saeed is still unknown to me,” she says. “Throughout all these years I have borne in my heart a heavy grief and an incurable sorrow. Unlike other mothers who have lost their children, I do not have even a gravestone to console me. You cannot understand the heartache and the endless anguish of a mother unless your loved one has disappeared into the dark.”

Mehdi Dallalzadeh Jahangiri, another victim of the 1988 mass executions, is also a victim of forced disappearance. For years his mother Alieh Alavi, who passed away in February, lived with just an old picture of him and the last shirt that he had worn to console her.

Sepideh Nasseri, Alieh Alavi’s granddaughter, has told IranWire that one day, when her grandmother was lingering at Khavaran Cemetery in the hope of being near her son’s grave, a security agent stopped her and asked whether she was sure that had had such a son at all – or perhaps whether her son was a fugitive who has escaped Iran illegally.

Security agents constantly talk down to the families of those who have been forcibly disappeared and try to dissuade them to from talking about them openly. Bahareh Monshi Roudsari, whose father disappeared during the mass executions of 1988 when she was still a little girl, says that even the principal of her school called her in and warned her not talk with classmates about his execution.

Another victim of forced disappearance in the 1980s was Mojtaba Mohseni. “We have been told that my brother was executed in 1988,” his sister Mercedeh tells IranWire. “We do not know exactly how and where it happened. They do not recognize our right to know about it. They did not give us the body and buried him themselves in a corner of a graveyard, possibly around Isfahan Gardens.

“My mother refused to go there. She always said ‘I do not recognize my son’s death’, and she continued to deny it for as long as she was alive. For years and years, we believed he might not have been executed, that they were keeping him somewhere to intimidate us, and that one of these days, they would tell us he had been released.”

Raha Bahraini tells IranWire that according to international law, the agony suffered by the families of those forcibly disappeared — including psychological trauma— is also a violation of the global ban on torture and inhumane treatment. Bahraini says that the UN’s Committee Against Torture and Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances have always condemned such behavior and they are aware of the treatment of Hedayat Abdollahpour’s family by the Islamic Republic.

 

Violating Even Its Own Laws

Bahraini also points out that according to Iranian domestic law, judiciary officials are required to notify families 48 hours before a relative’s execution and to allow them to pay a last visit. But, she says, “as of this moment, the lawyers of Hedayat Abdollahpour have not been informed of his execution. Local officials have only told the family verbally that he has been executed in secret and been buried in an unknown location.”

For the past few months, Bahraini says, Iranian officials have been playing a cruel game with the family and deliberately withheld information about him. They sent the family from city to city, trying to place the responsibility on the shoulders of various parties before eventually letting them know he had been executed.

“Earlier on, Urmia’s prosecutor’s office told the family and his lawyer that Abdollah’s case was not with them and had been sent to Oshnavieh [another city in West Azerbaijan],” says Bahraini. “But officials in Oshnavieh told them they did not have the case and Urmia had it. In fact, they have been inflicting brutal psychological torture on the family.”

Bahraini also points out that there are contradictions between the ruling by the Supreme Court and Abdollahpour’s trial documents. “Pay attention,” she says. “The ruling by the Supreme Court claims that the verdict against Hedayat Abdollahpour had been legal and fair. Whereas court documents show that he had confessed under torture and he had retracted his forced confessions during the trial. What’s more, there are no documents or evidence proving his guilt.”

By hiding the time, place and method of the execution of dissidents and minorities, Bahraini says, Iranian officials are actually committing several crimes against both the victims and their families.

“By covering up and by preventing the facts from coming out, they try to hide gross violations of human rights from the public eye,” she says. “They subject families to additional pain and agony and impose a culture of lawlessness on society.”

The message that the Iranian government is actually sending, says Bahraini, is that laws approved by the Islamic Republic itself carry no weight. It is only the absolute power of institutions that rules, and the regime can subject prisoners and their families to any pain and agony it wishes.

Hedayat Abdollahpour had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in a bloody clash between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) guerrillas and the Revolutionary Guards in Oshnavieh area on June 15, 2016. During his trial he recanted his confessions and said that he had not been involved the clash at all, but had been forced to confess under intense pressure and torture: including electric shocks, repeated floggings on the soles of his feet, and being hung upside-down from the ceiling.

The family are still awaiting official notification of what happened to him.

 

Related Topics:

I Still Don’t Know if They’ve Killed My Son or Not, 12 June 2020

Iran’s Blood-Soaked Secrets, 4 December 2018

A Map of Pain, A Map of Resistance, 21 September 2018

Iran Destroying Graves from 1988 Executions, 30 April 2018

Exclusive: Iran to Destroy Graves of Executed Political Prisoners, 18 September 2017

1988: The Crime that Won't Go Away, 3 August 2017

“The Skeletons in These Graves Could Change the Future”, 27 October 2016