Hashemi Rafsanjani, delivers his sermon of prayer under a poster showing the Iranian late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, left, and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, 2008. Vahid Salemi / Press Association. All rights reserved.Parastou Foruhar, daughter of Dariush and Parvaneh Foruhar, cried when she found the name of Ayatollah Omid Najaf Abadi on the list of “Reformists” running for election to the Council of Experts in Iran in March 2016. The judge had ordered the assassination of her parents, who were major opponents of the regime and brutally murdered in their home in 1998, as well as four other Iranian writers and political activists who were critical of dictatorship. Foruhar was even more shocked when she realized that many people who had been trying to bring Najaf Abadi to court had voted for him in the election.
Najaf Abadi is not alone on the list of candidates which the Reformists called the ‘List of Hope’. On this list were many other “hanging judges”, like Ayatollah Reyshahri the first head of Vavak (Iran’s intelligence ministry). He executed many Iranian air force pilots, officers as well as Iran’s Foreign Minister in 1980, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, and Seyed Mehdi Hashemi, who played a leading role exposing the secret relationship between Khomeini’s regime and the Reagan administration, which came to be known as Iran-Gate or the Iran-Contra Affair. Other “hanging judges” on the “List of Hope” included Mohseni Ejei, Ali Razini and Seyed Ebrahim Reisi, who was a judge presiding in 1988 when roughly 5000 prisoners who were already serving sentences were executed in three days.
Above all Hashemi Rafsanjani played a key role in re-reconstructing political dictatorship soon after the 1979 Iranian revolution, and prolonging the war with Iraq for seven years during which over two million Iranians and Iraqis were killed and injured. In the 1980s he orchestrated the execution of thousands of political prisoners and planned and executed the assassination of hundreds of political opponents both within Iran and outside Iran, including more than 70 in Europe. This only ended when, at the Mykonos trial in Germany, he along with ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several others was condemned for ordering the assassination of Kurdish leaders. His name is still held by Interpol as among criminals that must be tried. Some so-called reformist opposition elites support Rafsanjani, arguing that he is a changed man. Yet Rafsanjani continually talks about his past with pride; after his recent election he stated: “I have not changed, my opponents have changed.”
