Ali Akbar Hashemi Bahramani

Hashemi Rafsanjani, as a member of the Revolutionary Council, has played a direct role in implementing the program of closing and purging universities of dissenting students and professors, and violent repression of protesters against the Cultural Revolution. On 20 April, 1980, the Revolutionary Council announced a three-day deadline for closing the offices of all student organisations, and also closed the universities from 6 June, 1980 to plan an educational system based on the ideology of the Islamic Revolution. Following the announcement, there were widespread protests in universities across the country, which were suppressed by government agents attacking the universities with sheer violence. The crackdown injured many protesting students in various cities, including more than 300 at Shiraz University, 356 at Mashhad University and hundreds at Tarbiat Moallem University in Tehran. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, tens of thousands of students and faculty members were denied the right to study or work due to their political or religious beliefs.

 Cultural Revolution; Khomeini, Bani Sadr and Soroush in one front, BBC Persian, 13 July, 2017

https://www.bbc.com/persian/blog-viewpoints-48952483

Cultural Revolution in Iran: From the Elimination of Marxism to the Elimination of the Integral, BBC Persian, 2 May, 2016

https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran-features-52380016

Education Under the Siege of Politics (Cultural Revolution), Hamid Farhang, 22 July, 2008

https://rasekhoon.net/article/show/114701/%D8%A2%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B2%D8%B4-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%DA%86%D9%86%D8%A8%D8%B1%D9%87-%D8%B3%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%A8-%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%87%D9%86%DA%AF%DB%8C

As a member of the Revolutionary Council, he has played a role in institutionalizing unjust judicial processes in the courts of the Islamic Republic, by participating in the adoption of the regulations of the Revolutionary Courts and prosecution offices, which legalized the repression of dissidents and critics of the Islamic Republic by the judiciary.

The text of the regulations of the revolutionary courts and prosecution offices, approved in June 1979

  https://justice4iran.org/persian/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Khamenei-3.pdf

During Hashemi Rafsanjani's presidency, his government's Ministry of Intelligence assassinated dozens of writers and political activists critical of the Islamic Republic inside Iran and abroad.  Such individuals included Ahmad Mir Alaei, Ali Akbar Saeedi Sirjani, Ghaffar Hosseini, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, Ahmad Tafazzoli, Abdolrahman Boroumand and Shapur Bakhtiar.

On 17 September, 1992, the leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (Sadegh Sharafkandi, Homayoun Ardalan, Fattah Abdoli), and Noori Dehkurdi were killed in a terrorist operation at a restaurant called Mykonos in Berlin. The trial lasted three and a half years, and German officials eventually concluded that the Iranian government was directly involved in the killings. During the trial, Abul Hassan Bani Sadr testified about the role of Rafsanjani in in the assassination and the existence of a committee called the "Special Affairs Committee", which one of its duties is to lay the groundwork and monitor the execution of political assassinations.

An explosion at the Jewish Center in Buenos Aires in January 1994 killed 85 people and injured more than 300. Two years before that, a bomb exploded at an Israeli embassy in Argentina, killing 29 people. Argentina officially charged Iranian officials for the bombings, and a number of Islamic Republic officials, including Hashemi Rafsanjani, were put on the Interpol wanted list for their key role in the bombings.

Government assassinations in the Islamic Republic according to statistics, Shahed Alavi, February 2017

https://www.aasoo.org/fa/articles/1807

Iran: Argentinian Warrants Urge Rafsanjani's, Ex-Officials' Arrests, Radio Farda, 2006

https://www.rferl.org/a/1072648.html

Ex-president of Iran says Khameini gave order for killings, Irish Times, 1996

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ex-president-of-iran-says-khameini-gave-order-for-killings-1.79329

Following the implementation of the economic reform plan in the Hashemi government, and the 50% increase in the inflation rate, widespread protests were held in various cities of Iran, including Shiraz, Arak, Mashhad, Islamshahr and Qazvin. The protests were brutally suppressed by security forces, several protesters were executed, hundreds were detained and sentenced to flogging and long prison terms.

Account of the uprising of Mashhad, Islamshahr and Qazvin during the Hashemi era, Iran Wire, 2017

https://iranwire.com/fa/features/20267

Hashemi Rafsanjani, as the Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly (parliament), he has been instrumental in passing the Hudud and Qisas bill that established and enforced brutal and inhumane punishments such as execution, amputation, and flogging.

The Hudud and Qisas Bill, 1982

https://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/print_version/90591

As the Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, he has played a key role in approving the statutes of the Revolutionary Guards. Herein the Revolutionary Guards gained special powers to suppress and even eliminate political opponents, civil and human rights activists, and critics of the Islamic Republic.

Text of the Statute of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Parliamentary Research Center, 1982

https://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/90595

 - Back up link

The Seven Layers of Repression, Radio Farda, 1397

https://www.radiofarda.com/a/seven-layers-of-suppression-in-Islamic-republic-of-Iran/29421805.html

- Back up link

As the Speaker of Parliament, and the interim Friday Prayer Imam, he played a key role in the Massacre of political prisoners in the summer of 1988. By order of Ruhollah Khomeini, several thousand political and ideological prisoners , who had previously been tried and were serving their sentences, were sentenced to death in trials that were only minutes long, in August and September 1988. They were buried in mass graves. The majority of those executed were from leftist groups.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, in his Friday sermon on 28 August, 1988 explicitly spoke about the rejection of the repentance of political prisoners, and the need to eradicate them. Within his memoirs he wrote about how the topics of Mousavi Ardabili's Friday sermon, on 5 August, 1988 were determined. In this Friday sermon, Mousavi Ardebili explicitly called for the execution of all political prisoners without trial. Hashemi also wrote in his memoirs of a meeting with the Deputy Chief Justice and Deputy Head of the Prison Organisation on 9 August, 1988, and receiving a detailed report on the "situation of the political groups in the prison" and the number of prisoners "still remained in their political position."

Memoirs of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Hashemi Rafsanjani Document Centre,

Another look: Memoirs of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the removal of the narrative of the massacre of 1988, BBC Farsi, 29 July, 2011

https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran/2011/06/110629_l13_hashemi_memoirs_ganji