Archive for May 8th, 2013

1979: Twenty-one by revolutionary courts of the Iranian Revolution

Add comment May 8th, 2013 Headsman

At 5 a.m. today, 21 people were shot in Tehran by sentence of the previous day’s revolutionary court — the largest mass-execution since the Iranian Revolution three months prior. “Revolutionary courts consolidate the gains of the revolution,” exulted an official newspaper.

While the bulk of this morning’s condemned were lower-ranking Savak personnel or former policemen, several distinct VIPs were also shot along with them.

Gholam Riza Kianpour

The names of all 21 people executed this date can be perused by date-searching the Iran Human Rights Memorial database.

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Daily Double: The Iranian Revolution

1 comment May 8th, 2013 Headsman

The 1979 Iranian Revolution that ousted the U.S.-installed Shah struck a rich vein of official enemies from the ancien regime to prosecute.

In that contested first year, the Revolution’s liberals resisted with futility the onset of revolutionary courts, with judges-as-prosecutors who dispatched foreordained summary justice to characters high and low. Bloodthirsty crowds often packed the proceedings: not a few of the attendees wanted whatever comeuppance the courts could visit on the Shah for the deaths of loved ones disappeared, tortured, or gunned down in the streets.

Legendary English foreign correspondent Robert Fisk covered the Iranian Revolution on the ground. He remembered later:

There was not much mercy in the Iranian revolution: all the courts did was sentence men to death. But then there hadn’t been much mercy before the revolution, when the Shah’s imperial guard, the Javidan, or “immortals,” slaughtered the crowds. I remember another court, in Tehran, where a man shouted at a torturer from the notorious Savak security service: “You killed my daughter. She was burned all over her flesh until she was paralysed. She was roasted.” And the torturer looked back at the bereaved man and said quietly: “Your daughter hanged herself after seven months in custody.”

Photographs of the condemned, and even the executions, would hit the next day’s papers even while the next trial was underway.


Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dramatic firing squad execution in Sanandaj, August 1979.

The world press in that pregnant year has a steady drumbeat of execution announcements — six here, eleven there, and ballpark-only running counts mounting into the hundreds. For the most part, those that saw ink in the West were a random assortment of faceless ex-policemen or alleged spies on a day when the World roundup had a spare column-inch. But for the next two days, we have particularly noteworthy exemplars of justice in revolutionary Iran.

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