Political activist and human rights advocate
The killings that swept Iran last month revived memories of 1988, when the Islamic Republic erased thousands of political prisoners in silence—my brother, Bijan, among them.
While the world may see in the staggering death toll of the January protests an unprecedented explosion of violence, those of us who have spent decades seeking justice see something else: the chilling continuity of a regime that has only ever known one way to survive.
For us, the massacre of thousands of unarmed protesters is not a breakdown of the system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed.
The parallels with 1988 are as deliberate as they are haunting.
Back then, the Islamic Republic imposed a total information blackout. Prison doors were bolted. Phone lines were cut. Family visits were suspended without explanation. Families were left in torturous limbo, wandering from prison gates to government offices, met only with silence or lies.
Months later, the truth emerged in the most brutal form: a bag of personal belongings handed to a father, an order not to mourn, and the realization that a loved one was gone.
Today, the regime replicates that silence through digital darkness—a nationwide internet shutdown. But the scale has shifted. In 1988, authorities could intimidate families one by one. They ordered us not to hold funerals, not to cry, not to tell our neighbors. They believed that by hiding the bodies, they could hide the crime.
In 2026, the numbers are too large for secrecy to hold. When the reported death toll reaches 30,000 in a single week, grief becomes a tidal wave no blackout can contain. Familiar tactics of intimidation—extorting “bullet fees,” abducting the wounded from hospital beds, desecrating graves—no longer work as intended.
In 1988, the regime hid its atrocities beneath the soil of Khavaran. In 2026, in an unimaginable cruelty, it staged its terror in the open.
Videos that surfaced despite the shutdown shattered the nation: hundreds of lifeless bodies sealed in black plastic, lined along sidewalks and outside gray buildings like discarded refuse. Families were forced to walk these endless rows, performing a sadistic ritual of identification.
In one widely shared clip, a father’s voice trembles as he searches, calling out, “Sepehr, my son—my Sepehr, where are you?”
For decades, the Mothers of Khavaran—mothers, fathers, siblings, and children—refused to surrender to silence. They were the first to turn grief into political defiance. They wore white to funerals and memorials, rejecting the regime’s imposed black, the color of official sorrow.
White declared innocence. White rejected the legitimacy of the executioners.
They clawed at the dirt of Khavaran with bare hands, searching for truth even as Revolutionary Guards beat them and trampled their flowers.
That spirit has not vanished. It has evolved.
What we see today—mothers dancing at their children’s graves, distributing sweets instead of halva, clapping instead of wailing—is not denial. It is defiance. It is a refusal to allow a theocracy that has weaponized martyrdom for nearly half a century to dictate how death is understood. As one mother put it, our hearts are broken, but our spirits will not bend.
In 1988, impunity—enabled by an international community eager to close the Iran-Iraq war through UN Resolution 598—convinced Tehran that mass murder was an effective tool of statecraft.
Iran in 2026 is different. The world is watching in real time. The “Nuremberg moment” long urged by human-rights lawyers is no longer aspirational. It is necessary.
My brother Bijan and the thousands murdered in the dark summer of 1988 were denied even the pretense of justice: no trials, no headstones, no place in official history.
The Islamic Republic believed it was burying bodies. It was planting seeds.
Those seeds have now erupted. The legacy of the fallen is not buried in the mute soil of Khavaran; it lives in every young Iranian who stands firm before gunfire. We are no longer merely archivists of the dead. We have come to demand accountability.
History has never wavered on this truth: no tyranny is eternal. Their gallows will not save them from the dawn.
