Today the Foundation for Democracy in Iran is releasing a report on Iranian government involvement in the assassination of Iranian dissidents living abroad, which shows a dramatic upsurge in attacks since Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani assumed the Presidency of Iran in 1989.
Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, some 70 Iranian exiles and political activists have been killed by Iranian government agents overseas, according to credit reports. Forty-four of those killings took place since June 1989 when Mr. Rafsanjani took office.
The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI) has been particularly hard hit. Iranian government assassins have murdered two successive party leaders, according to court documents in Berlin and interviews with officials in Vienna, Austria, where the attacks occurred.
The KDPI alleges than an additional 36 Iranian Kurds have been killed in Iraqi Kurdistan since 1989 by Iranian government agents. These killings have been more difficult to document independently. Since open clashes between the two rival Iraqi Kurdish groups erupted in April 1994, an uncertain security climate has reigned in which assassinations are believed to have been carried out by Iraqi intelligence, the People's Mujahidin of Iran (PMOI), and the rival Kurdish groups themselves, in addition to those carried out by Iranian government "hit squads." Nevertheless, the KDPI allegations must be taken seriously, since the KDPI maintains good relations with both rival Iraqi Kurdish groups and with Baghdad, which has no interest at present in targeting Iranian Kurds. Dozens of KDPI members inside Iran have been executed in recent years, according to official Iranian government accounts.
The overseas assassination campaign has targeted individuals and organizations who had been or who were becoming prominent on the Iranian political scene, and must therefore be seen as a systematic attempt by the government of Iran to eliminate the opposition by targeting the leadership of opposition organizations.
The Iranian government has shown remarkable constancy in this goal. Between the first, unsuccessful attempt to assassinate former Premier Shahpour Bakhtiar in France and the second, successful attempt, some eleven years elapsed. According to court records examined by the Foundation, the Iranian government worked on the successful scheme for more than three years - the time it took to infiltrate an agent into Bakhtiar's personal entourage who succeeded in winning the former Prime Minister's confidence. It was this agent who introduced the killers to Mr. Bakhtiar without arousing his suspicion in August 1991. The individual responsible for the failed 1980 attempt, Anis Naccache, was flown to Iran where he received a hero's welcome, following his release from a French prison upon a special pardon from President Mitterrand.
Other major targets include the members of the PMOI, the Flag of Freedom Organization, and the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance (NAMIR). No monarchist leader has been attacked since 1987, perhaps a sign that the government in Tehran has felt less threatened from this direction in recent years than in the early years of the Revolution.
A number of assassination attempts have been thwarted, in some cases by the intended victims themselves. It has been reported that an Iranian leader in Paris, Colonel Hassan Aghilipour, President of the Foundation for the Independence of Iran, a human rights and political organization, spotted surveillance by Iranian government agents on at least two occasions since 1993 and reported them to the French police, who have placed him under protective surveillance. The leader of the Flag of Freedom Organization, Dr. Manoucher Gandji, claims a half dozen hit teams have been sent from Iran to assassinate him, and alleges to have obtained a copy of the Iranian government "fatwa" or death edict ordering his assassination. The People's Mujahidin assert that their leader, Massoud Radjavi, has escaped several attempts on his life by Iranian government agents operating in Baghdad.
The Iranian government has also targeted foreign nationals in its overseas assassination efforts. Since the 1980 attempt against former Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar in 1980, in which two French citizens were killed, some 13 other foreign nationals have been killed in attacks attributed to Iranian government agents or individuals operating on orders from Iran. Among them are individuals involved in publishing or translating British novelist Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and foreign diplomats of countries with ongoing disputes with the Iranian government.
When attacks on foreigners are included, a total of 85 individuals have been assassinated outside of Iran by Iranian government agents, according to court documents and other open sources, since a nephew of the former Shah was gunned down in Paris on December 7, 1979.
The Foundation applauds the UN Subcommission on Human Rights for its condemnation of Iran's extraterritorial killings, that was contained in a resolution voted in Geneva on April 24. The resolution said the body "deplores the continuing violence against Iranians outside the Islamic Republic of Iran," and reaffirmed that governments "are accountable for assassinations and attacks by their agents" against people living in other states. It was the 37th UN resolution condemning Iran for its human rights record. The resolution came on the heels of a highly critical, if reserved, report on the human rights situation inside Iran issued by the Commission's Special Representative for Iran, Maurice Copithorne, on March 21.
Mr. Copithorne concluded:
"the term 'human rights' does not yet seem to be widely accepted in the country as a system of values and procedures to preserve the dignity of the individual. A sense of the universality of that dignity, of its importance beyond politics, seems at best rudimentary." [UN report E/CN4/1996/59, paragraph 127, page 31.]
The Foundation for Democracy in Iran applauds the recent decision by the German Federal Prosecutor to issue an international arrest warrant for Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian-Khuzestani, for his role in plotting the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leaders in Berlin in 1992. The Foundation urges other Western governments, including the United States, to pursue vigorous judicial investigations into several outstanding cases where Iranian government involvement has been credibly alleged, including that of Hashem Abdollahi (murdered in Paris, 9/17/95), Cyrus Elahi (murdered in Paris, 10/23/90), and Abdelrahman Qassemlou (murdered in Vienna, 7/13/89), and Kazem Rajavi (murdered in Geneva, 4/24/90). The Austrian and Swiss authorities have been particularly remiss in allowing Iranian government agents identified by local law enforcement agencies for their direct involvement in the Qassemlou and Rajavi murders, to escape back to Iran.
The Foundation also calls on the government of Iran to immediately stop the murder of political opponents, both at home and abroad, and engage in a full, direct, open, and democratic dialogue with the opposition, without preconditions.
The Foundation for Democracy in Iran is a private, non-profit corporation registered in the State of Maryland. Contact: Kenneth R. Timmerman, Executive Director (exec@iran.org). FDI materials, including the FDI Newswire, are available free-of-charge via the Internet at http://www.iran.org/.