The People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI / MEK Iran), and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) reported that Ebrahim Raisi was sworn in as the next president of Iran on Thursday, provoking an anticipated outpouring of condemnation from around the world.

The crime against humanity

In recent years, public awareness of the crime against humanity in which Raisi played a key role during the summer of 1988 has exploded. Nonetheless, Ali Khamenei, the regime’s supreme leader, made it plain early on that Raisi was his preference to succeed Hassan Rouhani, the regime’s outgoing president.

Raisi’s role in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners is certain to have played an influence in that decision.

 

 

November 2019 uprising

The civilian population in Tehran is currently posing tremendous challenges. A widespread uprising in January 2018 and another in November 2019 were both narrowly avoided by the regime.

In the latter case, survival was made possible by one of Iran’s worst anti-dissent crackdowns in recent years. Within days of the protests began, security police and the Revolutionary Guards shot and killed 1,500 peaceful protestors.

Soon after, at least 12,000 activists were detained, and many of them were tortured over the course of several months.

 

 

The 1988 massacre

The dictatorship endeavored for many years to deny the existence of such a movement, which was facilitated by the fact that its operations had been mainly forced underground by the 1988 massacre.

The vast majority of the roughly 30,000 victims of that crime against humanity were members and sympathizers of Iran’s most powerful opposition party, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI / MEK Iran).

 

 

The Paris bomb plan

In June 2018, the dictatorship attempted to destroy the democratic opposition’s foreign base of support by attempting to infiltrate and set off explosives at a rally of Iranian ex-pats and political sympathizers held near Paris by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

The plot’s architect, Assadollah Assadi, a high-ranking Iranian diplomat-terrorist, was tried and sentenced to prison in Belgium earlier this year, along with three known co-conspirators.

The Belgian court established that the directions for the Paris bomb plan came from the Iranian regime’s highest ranks.

 

 

The conviction of the murder’s main perpetrators

Despite this, neither Brussels nor any other Western city has issued a formal request for accountability from the regime or key authorities or institutions.

Unfortunately, this parallels the international response to the 1988 massacre, which consists of sporadic resolutions from various legislative bodies but little evident effort to formally investigate the incident or pursue the conviction of the murder’s main perpetrators.

 

 

Impunity regarding most of its malign activities

Relative inaction in the face of the regime’s terrorism and human rights abuses has provided the mullahs with a sense of impunity regarding most of its malign activities. This was no doubt reinforced on Thursday when Enrique Mora, the deputy political director for the European External Action Service, attended Raisi’s inauguration and implicitly recognized his legitimacy on the world stage.

With this in mind, the international community faces a choice between sitting on the sidelines while the Iranian people fight against their own brutalization, or else taking steps to defend those people by telling regime authorities that there will be consequences for their abuses at long last.

 

 

MEK Iran (follow us on Twitter and Facebook)

and People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran – MEK IRAN – YouTube