40 Years Since Mass Execution Of Baha’i, Community Still Suffers
Followers of the Baha’i faith in Iran and abroad have held events to commemorate 10 Baha'i women who were hanged in the city of Shiraz on June 18, 1983.
Followers of the Baha’i faith in Iran and abroad have held events to commemorate 10 Baha'i women who were hanged in the city of Shiraz on June 18, 1983.
Two days before the executions, six Baha'i men had been also hanged over trumped up charges. They were among the 22 Baha’is who were sentenced to death out of about 100 Baha'i arrested as part of a crackdown in the southern city of Shiraz in the spring of 1983.
They were convicted for espionage as well as promoting Baha’i faith but in reality their crime was not recanting their beliefs, long hated by the Shia Muslim authorities who had taken over Iran a few years earlier.
The youngest of these women was Mona Mahmoudnejad, a 17-year-old girl whose father was also executed four months earlier, and the oldest of them was 57-year-old Ezzat Janami-Eshraghi, executed along with her daughter Roya that day, and two days after their father Enayatollah Eshraghi.
According to Ronald Reagan, the then US president who had pleaded to world leaders to join him to prevent the Iranian government's decision to execute the 22 Baha'is, 113 had already been hanged across Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, replied to Reagan’s plea at the time, saying: “If we don't have any other reason that they are American spies, Reagan's support for them is enough."
In the past several days, Iranian expatriate communities in addition to Baha’is and relatives of the victims held events to condemn the Islamic Republic’s executions and the unrelenting persecution of ethnic and religious minorities.
After an event in Oslo, Norwegian-Iranian politician Bijan Gharahkhani told Iran International that the most important issue for Iran today is the unity among people from different ethnicities and religions. He expressed hope for a future Iran in which no one is persecuted for their identities and views.
In Canada, Nahid Mazloum, the other daughter of Ezzat Janami Eshraghi who survived and escaped from the Islamic Republic, told New Canadian Media that “life goes on, but the pain never goes away,” before addressing a gathering of about 650 people from the Baha’i community in Vancouver last Friday, June 16.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in his message to the community in April during Ridván — a 12-day festival and the holiest time of the Baha’i calendar — said Canada is deeply concerned about the injustices endured by members of the faith in Iran.
In a letter from inside prison obtained by Iran International, human rights activist Narges Mohammadi said the execution of Baha’i women was “a manifestation, representation, and exposure of the tyrannical, anti-women regime of the Islamic Republic.”
The campaign of terror against Baha’is has been intensifying in recent years, according to the Worldwide Baha’i Community’s statement published in July 2022.
The Baha’i -- who number around 300,000 in Iran -- are the most persecuted religious minority in Iran. They are deprived of government jobs and university education, and the regime periodically instigates attacks on their communities, arrests them, confiscates their businesses and other assets, and demolishes their houses. The intelligence apparatus of the regime usually accuses the arrested Baha’is to having connections with the Baha’i Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel, the nine-member supreme ruling body of the Bahaʼi Faith.
Established by Bahaullah in the 19th century, the Baha’i faith initially spread in Iran and parts of the former Ottoman empire and remained mostly confined to Iran and the Ottoman empire until after the death of Bahaullah.
Its roots trace back to the religion of Ali-Mohammad Shirazi, known as the Bab (the gate), the founder of Babism who claimed to be a messenger of God in southern Iran in 1844. The Bab who said God would soon send a new prophet to mankind was executed for heresy against Islam which considers Muhammad as the last prophet of God.
In 1863 Bahaullah, the founder of Baha’i faith who was banished from Iran and settled in Iraq later, announced that he was the prophet promised by the Bab. The leadership of Baha’is fell to his son Abdul-Baha after his death in 1892 near Acre in present day Israel.
Baha’is believe in Muhammad as a prophet of God, and in the Quran as the Word of God while the Shia clergy consider Babism and the Baha’i faith as heretical sects.
The 1979 constitution of the Islamic Republic recognizes only Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has on several occasions called the Baha'i Faith a cult and in a religious fatwa in 2018 forbade contact, including business dealings, with followers of the faith.
However, Iran's Nuclear Safety Center has refuted the reports. In a statement on Tuesday, the center which is an affiliate of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) said the river Aras is monitored at least once a year for radioactive pollution and that the last survey in March this year did not indicate any radioactive pollution as claimed by Payam-e Ma newspaper on Monday.
Quoting a paper published earlier by the Border Studies Research Journal of the Iranian police, Payam-e Ma on Monday suggested that the extremely high occurrence of various types of cancers and liver diseases in Ardabil Province bordering the Republic of Azerbaijan, could be attributed to radioactive pollution of the Aras River emanating from Armenia’s nuclear power plant situated in Metsamor hundreds of kilometers to the west.
Payam-e Ma’s article followed a warning on June 12 by Mahmoud Abbaszadeh-Meshkini, a member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee who claimed that effluent from the power plant which was polluting the river could be the cause of the high occurrence of cancer in Iran’s Ardabil.
However, the cause of the high rate of cancer in the area is hard to establish. It is not clear whether the phenomenon is related to the environment or has other underlying reasons. But concerns linger on as many do not trust the Iranian government on the issue of radioactive contamination.
A deputy health minister, Dr. Reza Malekzadeh, told the media in October 2020 that a longitudinal study carried out over a period of 20 years about the occurrence of stomach cancer in Ardabil Province has shown a rate of 50 per 100,000 of the province’s population. This is the highest rate in the country.
However, the Nuclear Safety Center’s statement said the Armenian power plant is too far from the Aras for its effluent to reach the river and pollute it as claimed.
The Aras River which rises in Turkey forms part of Iran's border with its northwestern neighbors, Armenia and Azerbaijan, before flowing into the Kura River in Azerbaijan.
“The Aras River is being continually monitored for radioactivity and other required substances,” the statement said and added that the center will establish an online water monitoring station in the said area very soon to carry out tests.
In the past ten years, Iranian officials have repeatedly denied radioactive pollution of the Aras River by the Armenian nuclear plant.
Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant which is the only nuclear power plant in the South Caucasus was built in the 1970s. The two units of the plant provide a total of 815 MW of electricity and supplied approximately 40 percent of Armenia’s electricity in 2015.
The plant has been a source of environmental concern since the Spitak Earthquake in 1988 which led to its closure until 1995. The plant has been classified by the EU as the oldest and least reliable of all the 66 reactors built by the former Soviet Union.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), however, said in 2011 that the plant posed an “acceptable” level of risk to the environment and could “in principle” operate beyond its design life span.
The media have also warned that heavy metals in the effluent of other industries in Armenia, Turkey and Iran have been polluting the river for many years. Most of the pollution, however, is apparently caused by Armenian copper mines and plants in the area.
Firuz Ghasemzadeh, spokesman of the Iranian Water Industry, told the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) on May 10 that the Iranian ministry of energy and both Iran’s and Armenia’s departments of environment had been investigating the pollution caused by the Armenian mines.
According to Ghasemzadeh, sources of pollution were eliminated by installation of water treatment facilities, but occasional pollution was still possible. He also stressed that Armenia has given assurances that it would control the sources of pollution.
“The Albanian State Police have assured us that all actions were conducted in accordance with applicable laws, including with regard to the protection of the rights and freedoms of all persons in Albania,” read a statement issued on Tuesday.
Having found itself in quite a precarious predicament after dozens of Iranian dissidents seeking safe haven in Albania were reportedly injured Tuesday and one allegedly died in the raid, the State Department said it has been "assured" the Albanian government did not violate any human rights.
The State Department, which usually does not keep silent about such actions, and especially not against a group known to be active against the Islamic Republic, not only did not condemn the unexpected raid, but also distanced itself from the dissident group, raising concerns about the group’s actions against its own members.
"The State Department continues to have serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, including allegations of abuse committed against its own members,” noted the statement.
The State Department, however, pointed to the Albanian police accusations that the inhabitants of the camp were involved in cyberattacks against the Albanian government, adding, “We support the Government of Albania’s right to investigate any potential illegal activities within its territory."
Emphasizing that Washington does not view the MEK as “a viable democratic opposition movement that is representative of the Iranian people,” the State Department said, “The US government does not provide support or training to the MEK, does not contribute funding to the organization, and does not maintain substantive contact beyond issues related to the MEK’s resettlement, which was completed in 2016.”
Earlier on Tuesday, MEK said about a thousand Albanian police officers raided the group's exile center, Camp Ashraf, using tear gas and pepper spray. The group said that one of their members, identified as Ali Mostashari, was killed and more than a hundred others injured.
Despite initial denials, Albanian Interior Minister Bledi Cuci and the head of the national police, Muhamet Rrumbullaku, said both police officers and Iranian dissidents were injured during the raid at the Ashraf-3 camp near Manze, a small hill-town 30 kilometers (about 20 miles) west of Albania’s capital. However, the authorities disputed that the raid caused the man’s death.
Alleging that the attack was instigated by the Iranian regime, the MEK claimed that the actions by the Albanian police are “reminiscent of the criminal attacks by forces of Nouri al-Maliki (former prime minister of Iraq) on the original Camp Ashraf in Iraq between 2009 and 2015.”
Camp Ashraf 3 compound in Durres, Albania, is MEK's first home outside the Middle East established a few years after the 2013 massacre in the original Camp in Iraq in which 52 members died and seven went missing, leading to the relocation of the group.
In September 2022, Albania severed its relations with the Islamic Republic and expelled all Iranian diplomats and embassy staff following an investigation into a large-scale cyberattack that targeted the country’s infrastructure in July. The attack happened around the time of a conference held by the MEK.
The Tuesday attack against the de facto headquarters of the MEK took place about a month after the MEK-affiliated hacktivist group Uprising till Overthrow breached into 120 servers of the Iranian presidential office, getting access to internal communications, meetings minutes, and leaking troves of confidential data.