1993-94 Update: The Situation of the Bahá'ís in Iran
This article appeared in the 1993-94 edition of The Bahá'í World, pp. 139-145.The situation of the Bahá'í community in Iran remained precarious during 1993-94, despite a lessening of some of the more overt forms of persecution--perhaps a result of the government's intention to cool international concern. Nevertheless, violation of the full range of the community's rights in Iran persists.
Overwhelming evidence indicates that the Iranian Bahá'í community is still a major target of persecution. All Bahá'í youth continue to be denied access to university. Thousands of Bahá'ís are still prevented from obtaining employment and are denied the right to own their own businesses or receive a pension. As of January 1994, eleven Bahá'ís were in prison, two under sentence of death. The rights of Bahá'ís to function as a religious community are entirely denied. Bahá'í marriages are not recognized under the law; Bahá'ís are denied the right of assembly; and Bahá'í cemeteries, holy places, historical sites, and other assets have been either confiscated or destroyed.
Desecration of the Bahá'í Cemetery in Tehran
In July 1993 a section of the Bahá'í cemetery in Tehran was, under orders of the municipal authority, excavated by bulldozers for the construction of an Islamic cultural center. This involved the desecration of about two thousand graves. The remains of the Bahá'ís interred there were loaded onto trucks for an undisclosed destination. In response to protests, authorities responded with contradictory assertions and explanations, both denying and confirming the destruction of the cemetery. Some officials claimed that the cemetery was a public health hazard and that several Muslim cemeteries had been subjected to similar conversion projects. Others indicated that the purpose of the project was to level the uneven topsoil (about twenty to thirty centimeters) of graves older than thirty years to modernize and update the quality of the cemetery. The director of the Muslim Burial Society asserted that such projects were approved and implemented only after replacement properties had been allocated and the Bahá'ís had been assigned a property of some twenty-five thousand square meters with mortuary and other facilities.
The facts of the case, however, contradict the various official explanations. The Bahá'í cemetery was in usage for burial at the time of its confiscation at the beginning of Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 and had not yet been used to full capacity. Even some of the Bahá'ís executed during the rule of the current regime are buried there, and the claim that only graves older than the thirty-year legal limit were interfered with is completely false. At the beginning of the Revolution, the cemetery's mortuary facilities and memorial hall were demolished, the marble grave coverings were removed, and all grave site marking was obliterated. The headstones, many of which were of high quality, were subsequently sold at public auctions. Since the confiscation, Tehran's Bahá'ís have been permitted to bury their dead only in a piece of wasteland measuring approximately ten thousand square meters, already almost filled to capacity, which has not been officially allocated to them. In other localities, having access only to those cemeteries the government has designated for them, Bahá'ís also experience difficulties in burying their dead. Furthermore, they are not permitted to mark the graves of fellow Bahá'ís, making it almost impossible to identify the graves of their loved ones.
As the Bahá'í International Community remarked in a statement on the situation of the Bahá'ís in Iran released in October 1993, the government's right to renovate areas formerly used for the burial of its Muslim citizens, in accordance with Islamic law, is not disputed. However, the seizure of the central cemetery of the oldest Bahá'í community in the world, the erasure of all traces of its existence, and now the exhumation and removal of the corpses of illustrious figures of that religion "is an egregious offense against the conscience and cultural patrimony of the Bahá'ís throughout the world." The statement continued:
Attempts to minimize or obfuscate this basic truth only underscore the fact that this is but one more step in an ongoing campaign waged against the country's largest religious minority, deemed "unprotected infidels" and "members of the wayward sect" by the Iranian religious and judicial authorities.
The cemetery desecration brought vividly to mind the goal of the revolutionary government of Iran, as stated in a secret 1991 memorandum endorsed by the Ayatollah Khamenei and disclosed in 1993, to block systematically the progress and development of the Bahá'ís in that country and "to combat and destroy the cultural roots which this group has outside the country."
Bahá'ís and the Iranian Justice System
While there was an abatement in the executions of Bahá'ís in Iran during 1993-94, on 8 December 1993 death sentences were pronounced by the Islamic Revolutionary Council against Bihnam Mithaqi and Kayvan Khalajabadi. These verdicts rise solely from the men's membership in the Bahá'í community. The Court of Tehran accused them of collaborating with the United Nations to the detriment of their country by giving information on their case, but their only meeting with the United Nations Special Representative during his last visit to Iran was authorized by the Iranian government itself.
Their cases also underline the highly precarious situation facing Bahá'ís once in prison. When their original death sentences were overturned by the High Court, a second death sentence was handed down by the Islamic Revolutionary Council. Further, the death sentences were pronounced orally, and no written documentation exists of the court's verdict. The religious nature of such persecution is further underscored by the case against another Bahá'í, Mr. Ramidan-`Ali Dhulfaqari, who was arrested and charged with apostasy on 7 September 1993. He was subsequently released, but no reason was given, and the charge of apostasy has not yet been addressed. Indeed, it has been officially intimated to Mr. Dhulfaqari that he is condemned to death.
In another instance, an Iranian criminal court in a town near Tehran found that two Iranian Muslims had kidnapped and killed a Bahá'í, Rúhu'llah Qadami. But because the victim was "a member of the misguided and misguiding Bahá'í sect," the court ruled, "the issue of retribution is null and void." Since a Bahá'í is an "unprotected infidel," the accused were acquitted of murder. Instead they were sentenced to eighteen months in prison, including time already served, for "disturbance of order and security of society." Such a court decision sends a clear signal that Bahá'ís cannot expect any protection or redress from the Iranian justice system.
International Response
To address these and other similar situations, the Bahá'í International Community turned once again, as it has done repeatedly in the past, to the United Nations. During 1993 three United Nations committees--the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination--monitored the human rights of minorities in Iran and received reports, both oral and written, made on behalf of the Iranian government. While the government asserted that no one in Iran can be harassed on the basis of his or her beliefs, and a press release issued by the Iranian Embassy in Bonn on 23 September 1993 declared that "the fact that the Bahá'í Religion is not recognized as a revealed religion in Islam should not be interpreted as if the adherents of the Faith were persecuted," the findings of the three United Nations committees show that such statements do not reflect the actual situation of the Bahá'ís in Iran. In fact, the committees' comments not only express dissatisfaction with the Iranian delegation's presentation of the situation of the Bahá'ís, but convey in unequivocal language a grave concern for the treatment of the Bahá'ís in Iran.
The Bahá'í International Community made a strong representation concerning the case of the Bahá'ís in Iran at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993. Later in the year, the United Nations Special Representative investigating the human rights situation in Iran, Mr. Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, specifically mentioned the Bahá'ís in both his interim report of November 1993 and his final report of March 1994, where he devoted thirteen pages to comments on the Bahá'ís' situation. Shortly after the release of the interim report, in December 1993, the forty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution on the human rights situation in Iran with specific mention of the Bahá'ís. On 9 March 1994 the United Nations Human Rights Commission adopted a strong resolution in which it cites religious discrimination against the Bahá'ís, "whose existence as a viable religious community" in Iran "is threatened."
Action by the Bahá'í Community
Bahá'í communities around the world, galvanized by the plight of their Iranian brethren, worked through legitimate governmental and diplomatic channels to keep the situation of the Bahá'ís of Iran in the consciousness of their elected and appointed representatives on the national and international stage.
The Bahá'í community in France sent representatives to a meeting with the Iran Desk of the French government, resulting in newspaper articles in Le Monde and Libération in July 1993. During the same month the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) interviewed the secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the United Kingdom about the destruction of the Tehran cemetery and about the secret government memorandum outlining plans for the destruction of the Bahá'í community both within and outside Iran. Also in July, a government deputy in Brazil met with the Iranian ambassador to that country in support of the Bahá'ís in Iran.
The American Bahá'í community sponsored "An Appeal to the Conscience of Humankind," urging the world's leaders to continue to speak out against Iran's plan to destroy the Bahá'ís. It was co-signed by forty-nine prominent American cultural and political figures and appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in November 1993. During that same month the US Senate adopted, by unanimous vote, a resolution calling upon Iran to end its persecution of the Bahá'ís in Iran, and in April 1994 the US House of Representatives adopted the same resolution, also by unanimous vote. This marked the sixth time since 1982 that the US Congress had expressed, in the words of Senators Christopher J. Dodd and Joseph I. Lieberman, "its deep sense of concern over the officially-sponsored repression that has been directed against Bahá'ís since the Iranian Revolution. While this repression has been less violent in recent years, we remain concerned that the Bahá'ís--Iran's largest religious minority--continue to be singled out for persecution based on their religious beliefs." Also in April 1994, in a speech at the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Clinton cited Iran's "abusive treatment" of Bahá'ís, along with "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia, as a critical human rights concern.
There is no doubt that the efforts of Bahá'í communities around the world, from Africa to Europe, from South America to the islands in the South Pacific, from North America to Asia, have been instrumental in the abatement of the worst atrocities practiced by the Islamic Republic of Iran against the Bahá'í minority in Iran. Through direct letter-writing campaigns from National Spiritual Assemblies around the globe to the Iranian government leaders, through urgent protests to the Iranian embassies or consulates around the world, through approaches to governments and requests for their intervention on behalf of the Bahá'ís, and finally through contacts with the news media resulting in widespread coverage, the Bahá'í community has focused the world's attention on the activities of the Iranian government and has thus effectively stemmed the tide of executions. Nevertheless, the less sensational forms of persecution persist, and the dangers facing the Bahá'í community are still very real. Until they are permitted by law to receive education at the university level in the fields they wish to study, until they are permitted by law to own their own businesses and property, until they have the same privileges and freedoms by law as their fellow citizens, the Bahá'ís' rights are threatened, and the world must not forget their plight.