The photographs of some of the at least 5,000 political prisoners that the Iranian authorities ordered executed in the summer of 1988 look like those on a college graduation certificate. In the report Secrets soaked in blood, which Amnesty International released more than 20 years later about that massacre, many of these images show faces of twenty-somethings, men and women, but also children’s faces, barely adolescents. Those thousands of Iranians were executed that summer in Iran and then buried in mass graves, after a commission of four followers of the Islamic regime ordered their deaths. According to numerous witnesses, one of those four men was Ebrahim Raisí, president of Iran since 2021, whose helicopter disappeared this Sunday in a mountainous area near Varzeqan, in the northwest of the country.
The events of that now distant 1988 earned Raisí the reputation of being an easy gallows magistrate, what is known in Iran as a “hanging judge.” That disgrace has never left him in the eyes of many Iranians, who see in him a brake on change, a guardian of the ultra-conservative orthodoxy of the Iranian Islamic regime, whose greatest exponent is the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That tendency, that of the so-called “principalists”, is what now controls practically all the levers of power in Iran. Those who oppose any Western influence in Iran are active in it, they advocate imposing blind obedience to the supreme leader and moving towards an all-out Islamic society, governed by the theocratic principle of Velayat-e Faqihor government of the clerics.
Faithful servant of the regime
The biography of this jurist, the object of ridicule for his lack of eloquence and who does not even know that he truly has higher education in Jurisprudence, as he claims, has been from his youth that of a faithful servant of the Islamic regime established in Iran in 1979. , when Raisí was 18 years old. Born in Mashhad, about 850 kilometers east of Tehran, 63 years ago, married with two children, he studied at the Qom seminary, a religious institution from which many hierarchs of the Islamic Republic have emerged. His career as a clergyman was boosted by his status as a saideddirect descendant of the prophet Muhammad.
In Qom, Raisí received classes from several ideologues of the current Iranian regime. In 1981, at the age of 20, he was appointed prosecutor. He had not yet turned 30 when he participated, as deputy prosecutor of Tehran, in the commission that ordered thousands of opponents to be hanged, according to Amnesty International and numerous witnesses. His career has always been on the rise. Between 2004 and 2006, he was vice president of the Supreme Court and, between 2014 and 2016, he served as attorney general.
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His career took another step when, in 2017, he ran for president for the first time. He was defeated by the moderate Hasan Rohaní, but, from that moment, the power apparatus began to prepare his arrival to the country’s second political office. Meanwhile, in 2019, Raisí was appointed head of the judiciary. Finally, in 2021, the all-powerful Guardian Council, a body fundamentally controlled by the supreme leader, cleared its path to the presidency by vetoing 600 candidates for the elections. All the moderates, except one, who also ended up resigning, were ruled out. In the end, only three minor candidates competed in the presidential elections without competition, tailored to Raisí.
His victory in those June 2021 elections was the culmination of his career, but that victory showed the holes in the regime. He only got the votes of a third of the electorate. The turnout, at 48%, was the lowest in the history of the Islamic Republic, which used to record turnout data of over 70%. Furthermore, almost 13% of those who voted did so blank. This terrible figure in a country in which many workers – for example, civil servants – are forced to vote demonstrated the crisis of legitimacy that the regime was already experiencing, especially since Raisí’s name was already being heard as a favorite to succeed the president. octogenarian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
The Ayatollah and Raisí, his right-hand man, confirmed their immobility, their resistance to the change desired by a large part of the population, when a 22-year-old girl, Mahsa Yina Amini, died in police custody on September 16, 2022, three days later. of being arrested in Tehran for wearing her veil incorrectly. Her response to the demonstrations unleashed by Amini’s death was a repression that for the UN Independent Mission for Iran included the commission of crimes against humanity. In it, at least 550 Iranians died at the hands of paramilitaries and security forces and 60,000 Iranians were detained for participating in that popular cry whose motto was and is “Woman, life and freedom.” At least nine men have been hanged in connection with the protests, one of them in public. When, after these deaths, the protests quieted down, Raisí’s name no longer sounded so much like Khamenei’s dolphin.
At the celebrations for the 44th anniversary of the Islamic Republic, on February 11, 2023, Raisi alluded in a speech to the demonstrations, which he called “riots,” and boasted of the “defeat of Iran’s enemies.” In the following months, the president announced new measures to impose the veil on the thousands of Iranians who, since Amini’s death, have removed it as a gesture of civil disobedience. Many Iranians have not forgotten that Raisi was considered a “hanging judge.” Under his presidency, executioners in Iran have worked at a frenetic pace. In the five months since 2024, Iran has executed at least 226 people, more than one a day, according to the exile NGO Iran Human Rights. The Iranian regime is also the largest executioner of women on the planet: 10 so far this year.
This Sunday, after the announcement of the disappearance of the presidential helicopter and the official media’s request for Iranians to pray for Raisí, some videos of people praying for his life have been released. At the same time, social networks “have been filled with mockery and memes” from exiles and even citizens still inside the country who celebrated the disappearance of the president, explains Spanish-Iranian activist Ryma Sheermohammadi. In a tweet, two exiled Iranian girls appear toasting with beer and without veils on the icon of a helicopter. They are the daughters of Minoo Majidi, one of the victims of the repression of the “Women, Life and Freedom” movement.
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