Time for Iran’s Nuremberg Trials

The elimination of the Islamic Republic cannot come too soon. After 47 years since the Demonic Revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power, and Iranians to their knees, subjugated by the mullahs’ extremist Islam, Iranians need to be free. Iranians will celebrate the fall of the terrorist regime with glee, but to be complete there also needs to be justice for the perpetrators.

What’s needed is an Iranian version of the Nuremberg Trials.

While the ayatollahs’ seat of power physically is in Tehran, the spiritual seat of power is in their “holy city,” Qom. The Qom Trials will turn the city from which the Islamic Republic derived its theological “authority” abusing Iranians for decades into a capital of justice.

Following WWII and the Holocaust (with the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz commemorated this week), the allied powers needed to come up with a framework to bring justice to the perpetrators of the genocide of the Jewish people and other crimes against humanity. Facing the challenge of how to deal with Nazi war criminals, rather than summary executions or purely national trials, they instituted an international legal process to establish individual accountability and deter future such crimes.

The charges against the Nazis included: conspiracy to commit crimes, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. A total of 199 defendants were tried, 161 convicted, 37 of whom were sentenced to death. While this was groundbreaking and critical, it’s worth remembering that the Nazis’ crimes spanned less than 15 years. After 47 years of the Islamic regime in control, it seems that these numbers will only scratch the surface in Iran.

What’s needed now is to establish a new framework to try and bring to justice leaders and agents of the Islamic Republic. There is a body of international law and precedent for the world to bring foreign terrorists to trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nazi Germany existed for less than a generation. Islamic republic for nearly half a century. The list of crimes and people to be tried will be endless. That alone makes this urgent.

\While I was subject to the misogyny and cruelty of the Islamic Republic since I was a young girl, many of these experiences I recounted in my books, it’s hard to imagine anyone in Iran who doesn’t have a list of people who are responsible for unspeakable crimes. I have mine.

• Ali Akbar HeydariFar is one of the judges who sentenced me to death;
• Judge Heydari was my second judge;
• Saeed Mortazavi was the judge who told me he will make sure I will be executed;
• Yahya Pirabbasi, another of my judges;
• Mohammad Moghiseh is the judge who ordered the execution of many of my friends in prison;
• Sadegh Larijani, the head of all judges;
• Abbas Jafari Dolat Abadi, the Tehran prosecutor who visited me in prison before my release, enraged by Pope Benedict’s letter advocating for me and my friend Mariyam, and threatening not to talk to anyone about what happened to us in prison and our trial.

Many of the most terrible people have no online presence and go by fake names. In order never to forget them, and in prayer that these will be used to bring them to justice – something that seemed unimaginable in 2009 – my friend Maryam and I came up with sketches of two of the criminals. One of our interrogators went by “Rasti.” He was the one who lied and got me to the police station where the interrogations began. Another, “Haghighat,” threated to beat us until we vomited blood.

Two more people who must be brought to justice are:

• Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’I, the Chief Justice of Iran who has blood of countless Iranians on his hands;
• Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While no Iranian presidents should escape justice, when I was in prison I witnessed how many people were arrested, tortured and killed because of his direct order and fraudulent election that sparked the Green Movement which he represses with unspeakable brutality.

It’s important that the leaders of the regime are not able to flee, and that there is an immediate means to arrest them all, and hold them until charges can be brought. It’s also urgent that agents of the regime abroad are arrested and extradited to free Iran, and brought to justice. That’s necessary for Iranians who know who they are, but also for the Western and other countries where they live and which they infiltrate with their evil extremist Islamic values at the behest of the ayatollahs. Left alone, they will be a national security threat to the countries that harbor them. Any country that takes and shelters leaders and agents of the regime to be protected in their borders should face unrelenting sanctions.

Part of the justice that’s needed in order for Iranians to feel as if they are truly liberated is that the trials must be held, and justice served, in Iran. Doing so will create an example to the world and to the Iranian people. International trials will not do the same.

The crimes of the Islamic regime and its leaders have not been limited to the horrific scenes we have seen coming out of Iran these past weeks, but the wholesale brutalization of millions of Iranians for nearly half a century. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. Maybe millions. The Islamic Republic and its leaders are guilty of widespread crimes directly, and through its terrorist tentacle proxies around the globe, where millions more have suffered. There needs to be justice for them, and there needs to be a trial of the ayatollahs, mullahs, judges, IRGC, basij, jailers, interrogators, police and others who are guilty of these crimes.

Following President Trump’s post to encourage Iranians in early January – “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY! MIGA!!!” – Iranians took to the streets and have continued to protest. Tens of thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands injured.

Like those found guilty in Nuremberg, the bodies of those who are sentenced to death should be cremated, their ashes dumped into the Persian Gulf in order to prevent ever setting up a shrine to them. The tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini should be burned to the ground, and its remains and his also dumped into the Gulf.

Doing this will serve as an additional form of justice for the hundreds of thousands or more victims of the Islamic Republic, many of whom were simply “disappeared” and have no resting place, and no closure for their loved ones. While their crimes cannot be erased, every physical presence of their lives can be.

In a dream once, I asked God why He allowed the suffering to take place in Iran. He said that He was giving the leaders the opportunity to repent and, if not, He would bring His justice. I am praying that President Trump will follow his words with swift action, that the senseless and criminal murder of tens of thousands of Iranians will stop, and that everyone involved from the “Supreme Leader” down to the lowest policeman will be arrested and see justice.