DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A desert-like patch of sand and scrawny timber within the largest cemetery in Iran’s capital has been the ultimate resting place for many years for a number of the 1000’s killed within the mass executions that adopted Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Now, Lot 41 on the sprawling Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran is turning into a car parking zone, with their stays probably beneath asphalt.
Photos from Planet Labs PBC present the car parking zone being laid over the location, the place opponents of Iran’s nascent theocracy and others had been quickly buried following their executions at gunpoint or by hanging.
The positioning, lengthy monitored by surveillance cameras looking for any signal of dissent or remembrance at what officers have known as the “scorched part,” has seen state-sponsored demolition up to now, with grave markers vandalized and overturned. Iranian officers have acknowledged the latest determination to construct the parking, with out going into element about these buried there.
That is as a United Nations particular rapporteur in 2024 described Iran’s destruction of graveyards as an effort to “conceal or erase knowledge that might function potential proof to keep away from authorized accountability” over its actions.
“Many of the graves and gravestones of dissidents had been desecrated, and the timber within the part had been intentionally dried out,” mentioned Shahin Nasiri, a lecturer on the College of Amsterdam who has researched Lot 41. “The choice to transform this part right into a car parking zone suits into this broader sample and represents the ultimate part of the destruction course of.”
Final week, each a Tehran deputy mayor and the cemetery’s supervisor acknowledged the plans to create a car parking zone on the location.
“On this place, hypocrites of the early days of the revolution had been buried and it has remained with out change for years,” Tehran’s deputy mayor Davood Goudarzi informed journalists in footage aired by state tv. “We proposed that the authorities reorganize the area. Since we wanted a car parking zone, the permission for the preparation of the area was acquired. The job is ongoing in a exact and sensible approach.”
The satellite tv for pc images present the work started in earnest firstly of August. An Aug. 18 picture reveals about half of Lot 41 freshly paved over, with development materials nonetheless on web site. Vans and piles of asphalt will be seen on the web site, suggesting work continued.
The reformist newspaper Shargh quoted Mohammad Javad Tajik, who oversees the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, as saying the car parking zone would assist folks go to a neighboring lot, the place authorities plan to bury these killed within the Iran-Israel warfare in June.
A significant airstrike marketing campaign by Israel killed outstanding army generals and others, with authorities officers placing the loss of life toll at greater than 1,060 folks killed, with an activist group placing it at over 1,190.
The choice to repurpose the graveyard seems to conflict with Iran’s personal laws, which permit for a cemetery to repurpose land the place internments came about after greater than 30 years — so long as households of the lifeless agree with the choice.
An outspoken lawyer in Iran, Mohsen Borhani, publicly criticized the choice to pave over the graveyard as neither ethical nor authorized in an interview with Shargh.
“The piece was not just for executed and political folks. Peculiar folks had been buried there, too,” he reportedly mentioned.
It stays unclear whether or not human stays sit beneath the layer of asphalt or if Iranian authorities moved the bones of the lifeless there. Nonetheless, Iran has destroyed different graveyards in recent times for these killed in its 1988 mass execution that noticed 1000’s put to loss of life, leaving their bones there.
Authorities have additionally vandalized cemeteries for the Baha’i, a spiritual minority within the nation lengthy focused, and people dwelling to protesters who’ve died in latest nationwide protests towards Iran’s theocracy from the 2009 Inexperienced Motion to the 2022 Mahsa Amini demonstrations.
“Impunity for atrocities and crimes towards humanity has been constructing for many years within the Islamic Republic,” mentioned Hadi Ghaemi, the manager director of the New York-based Middle for Human Rights in Iran. “There’s a direct line between the massacres of the Nineteen Eighties, the gunning down of demonstrators in 2009, and the mass killings of protesters in 2019 and 2022.”
Behesht-e Zahra, or the “Paradise of Zahra,” opened in 1970 on what was then the agricultural outskirts of Tehran. As lots of of 1000’s of Iranians flooded into the capital underneath the shah because the nation’s oil wealth skyrocketed, stress on Tehran’s cemeteries had grown to some extent that the burgeoning metropolis wanted a spot for all of its lifeless as effectively.
The cemetery has lengthy been a resting place for a number of the most well-known Iranians since — and a degree the place historical past turned for the nation.
On his return to Iran in 1979 after years in exile, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini traveled first to the cemetery, the place a few of these killed within the rebellion towards the shah had been buried. Khomeini’s cleric courts later issued loss of life sentences for these now interred at Lot 41.
After his loss of life in 1989, Iran constructed a towering, golden-domed mausoleum for Khomeini linked to the cemetery. As Behesht-e Zahra grew, Lot 41 discovered itself surrounded by an ever-expanding variety of tons for burials.
Nasiri mentioned his analysis with others suggests there are 5,000 to 7,000 burial websites inside Lot 41 of these Iran “thought-about spiritual outlaws,” whether or not communists, militants, monarchists or others.
“Many survivors and relations of the victims are nonetheless looking for the graves of their family members,” Nasiri mentioned. “They search justice and purpose to carry the perpetrators accountable. The deliberate destruction of those burial websites provides an extra impediment to efforts of truth-finding and the pursuit of historic justice.”
