On this date in 1982, Khosrow Khan Qashqai was publicly hanged in Shiraz.

A member of the pastoral Turkic Qashqai people of southern Iran, Khosrow returned from exile* with the Iranian revolution. These were the revolution’s hopeful first days, when SAVAK was gone and a new world was possible.

Before it went all pear-shaped.

Not long after Khosrow’s constituents sent him to the new Iran’s new Parliament, relations with the emerging theocratic dictatorship soured, sending the Qashqai leader fleeing to the hills one step ahead of the new secret police in 1980.

Khosrow et al held out for two years before succumbing to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — a grim period throughout Iran, marked by growing suppression of political dissidence and the ruinous war with neighboring Iraq.

Thirty years on, Qashqai still labor under discriminatory cultural restrictions and even property expropriation that the U.N. has charged constitutes a campaign of “ethnic restructuring”.

* The Shah kicked him out for having backed Mossadegh.

On this day..

• 1980: Necdet Adalı and Mustafa Pehlivanoğlu, September 12 coup sacrifices
• 1946: Walter Grimm and Karl Mumm, judicial murderers
• 1852: Adam Wimple, his executioner's lodger
• 1586: John Lowe, John Adams, and Robert Dibdale, English Catholics
• 1926: The Lowman lynchings
• 1946: The Neuengamme camp war criminals
• 1760: John Bruleman, weary of life
• 1295: Thomas Turbeville, undercover knight
• 1354: Cola di Rienzi, last of the Roman Tribunes
• 1927: Martyrdom of Five Christeros
• 1789: Rachel Wall, female pirate
• Themed Set: Women Who Kill
• 1997: Ricky Lee Green