 "How Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi became infamous as ‘The Butcher of Tehran’")
Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in the mountains to the northwest of the country. His death is a blow the the Islamic Republic’s hardline politics.
Raisi took power in 2021 after a controversial election in which several popular candidates were disqualified. His tenure was marred by a crackdown on historical mass protests after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2002 and the enforcement of a strict women’s dress code.
But even before Raisi became president he was criticised for his brutality, earning the infamous title of the “Butcher of Tehran”. We tell you why.
How Raisi led the persecution of minorities
Iran’s Raisi followed his father’s footsteps and studied theology and Islamic jurisprudence under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei . He joined the clergy and participated in demonstrations against the Shah of Iran, which led to his ouster.
The cleric started his career after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was named the prosecutor-general of the Karaj and Hamadan provinces at 20. He is alleged to have played a key role in persecuting minorities, especially the Baha’is (the largest religious minority in Iran), and political opponents. It led to several deaths and many were tortured and jailed.
Also read: How India-Iran ties grew under Ebrahim Raisi
Raisi and the Death Commissions of Iran
In July 1988, Iran agreed to a United Nations ceasefire to end the eight-year war with Iraq. Soon after the then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a secret fatwa ordering judicial authorities to execute political prisoners who were already serving sentences, according to The Atlantic Council. They were presented for questioning before four-member inquisition panels, known to prisoners as “Death Commissions,” which lasted only minutes.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsSet up across the Islamic Republic, these inquisitions comprised religious judges, prosecutors, and intelligence ministry officials. They decided the fate of thousands of detainees in arbitrary trials within minutes, according to a report by Amnesty International.
By then Raisi had moved to Iran as the deputy prosecutor of the Revolutionary Court of Iran and served as a member of the “Death Commissions” . At 27, he was the youngest of the four members of the panel and was responsible for the mass executions of Marxists and other leftists.
“In July 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini decreed that all prisoners steadfast in their support for the opposition and ‘waging war on God’ were ‘condemned to execution’. He reportedly issued a second or related fatwa focusing on members of communist and leftist parties as well as people charged with apostasy,” according to a report in the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), an independent institution that promotes conflict resolution.
According to USIP, the death committees operated in 32 cities in Iran. Between 4,000 to 5,000 political prisoners were executed across the country. Many were denied due process and several who were killed were to be released. “The decisions about which prisoners were to be executed and which spared were arbitrary in the extreme,” Amnesty International reported in December 1990.
Iran downplayed the scale and in February 1989, then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani claimed that “less than 1,000” were executed.
However, Farhad Rezaei, a senior fellow at the Philos Project, wrote in Newsweek in 2022 that Raisi was directly implicated in executing close to 8,000 political prisoners who had already served non-capital sentences. In the piece, he quoted international lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who investigated the massacre, and found it to be “the second-worst violation of prisoners’ rights since the end of World War II, superseded only by the mass killing in Srebrenica, Bosnia, and Herzegovina”.
It was these 1988 mass executions which earned the Iranian leader the infamous nickname “The Butcher of Tehran”.
Raisi served as deputy head of the judiciary for 10 years, before being appointed prosecutor-general in 2014. Five years later, the United States imposed sanctions on him for human rights violations, including the 1980s executions.
“As deputy prosecutor general of Tehran, Raisi participated in a so-called ‘death commission’ that ordered the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988,” the US treasury department said in the sanctions announcement.
When Raisi defended the executions
In 2021, when the hardliner was asked about human rights groups’ allegations that he was involved in the killings, he said, “If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised.”
“I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far,” he added.
The United Nations called for an investigation into Raisi’s role shortly after his election in 2021. “I think it is time and it’s very important now that Mr Raisi is the president (-elect) that we start investigating what happened in 1988 and the role of individuals,” Javaid Rehman, the UN investigator on human rights in Iran, had said then.
More crackdowns under Raisi
A year after Raisi took over as president, he empowered the morality police and imposed more restrictions on women and religion. It led to unprecedented protests – the largest and longest in the Islamic Republic – followed by the death of Amini in 2022.
However, the Iranian government continued its repressive methods to curb demonstrations. Over 500 protesters were killed and hundreds more were injured or disappeared.
Iran also renewed its wave of executions last year, according to a report in Iran International. The country executed 834 people last year, a new record for the regime since 2015, according to two reports published by the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM).
The United Nations cited the same number, suggesting that more executions could have been carried out. According to the rights groups’ report, in 2023, the number of public hangings in Iran tripled compared to 2022. The country executed two juvenile offenders and 22 women, the highest number in the past decade, the report says.
With more restrictions and crackdowns, Raisi showed his loyalty to the supreme leader and the conservative elites. Now after his death, the mass executions have become a part of his legacy.
With inputs from agencies
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