Iran: why the Islamic regime feared a rose garden
23 February 2009. A World to Win News Service. It has been reported that between 9-16 January this year the Islamic Republic of Iran bulldozed a section of the Khavaran mass grave. Located around 15 kilometres southeast of Tehran, Khavaran is not an ordinary cemetery. It is the collective burial site for the hundreds and maybe more executed communists and other revolutionaries. With this act the regime is trying to hide its criminal and brutal nature, but it is also giving proof of how it fears even the bodies of revolutionaries murdered three decades ago.
The memory of the 1980s terror can never be erased from the minds of the people of Iran. Following the robbery of the people's revolution by the reactionary Islamic forces headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, a storm of terror dominated the sky over Iran. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian communists and other revolutionaries and progressive activists were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and tens of thousands of them were systematically executed in order to wipe away all traces of the real revolutionaries in Iran.
After the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the mad killing of the communists and revolutionaries went even further and tens of thousands of political prisoners who were still in prison were massacred in the summer of 1988.
The fear of the existence of such revolutionaries was so high that the Islamic regime could not withstand it even though they had them captive in its highly secured prisons. So it decided to kill them and bury them in mass graves in unknown places. Khavaran is only one of those gravesites that was discovered by the family and friends of the martyred. There are comparable graves in other provinces and there are reports that similar actions by the regime have already taken place in Gilan and Mazendaran, two northern provinces by the Caspian Sea. Many of the Sarbedaran fighters who were martyred during the Amol uprising in 1981or were executed later are buried in Mazendaran province.
For the families, friends and comrades of the murdered, it didn’t matter who was buried in Khavaran – they regarded all the graves as those of loved ones. And they did everything they could to honour the memory of all those whose lives were taken their by the new Islamic rulers and turn this burial site into a trench of struggle. So the Khavaran gravesite was turned into a rose garden.
The Islamic regime wanted to make it an unknown and forgotten grave, and a lesson to those who dare to fight them, but instead Khavaran became a symbol of respect for the goal and struggle of those revolutionaries who were buried there and an embodiment of outstanding resistance and struggle against the oppressors. It became a place for the unity among those who had lost their beloveds and were determined to expose the regime's crimes, and for people to gather and sing the Internationale, the anthem of the international communist movement.
This criminal act by the regime could not remain unanswered and indeed there have been broadly-based protests inside and outside Iran. Some human rights organisations including Amnesty International have issued statements. Demonstrations have taken place in Germany, Norway and other countries. A Committee of Iranian Youth in Europe (www.commitee.blogfa.com) organised a protest against the destruction of the Khavaran rose garden on 7-8 February in Berlin that received the support of many of Iranian and German individuals and organisations.
- end item-
[ Back to top ]