Very true about official records, but the "disappeared" you refer to, are they those referred to in this story?
They Are All Reformers Now, Even the Hangmen, The Independent, February 19
… The West has always consistently and willfully misunderstood Iran and we were at it again yesterday. The US government and, of course, the American press and CNN and all the usual suspects were billing the elections as a crucial struggle between "reformers" and "hardliners", a poll which could give President Khatami… a parliament that would at last break the power of the "conservatives", the "radicals", the "extremists"….
… Look at some of the men who now say they are… now calling themselves "reformers". Rafsanjani, Mohtashemi, Karroubi, the list is endless, all men from the past, a few of them - Mohtashemi comes to mind - with blood on their hands and a number of "pro-Khatamists" (not, mercifully, candidates) with blood all over them. Why, wasn't that friendly Ayatollah Khalkhali advocating reform this month the very same Ayatollah Khalkhali who… had hanged men like thrushes in Evin Prison, including a 14-year-old old boy who, he said, was not on his conscience because he had "sent him to heaven"?
And what of those stories now moving through the bazaars? In the decade up to 1998, so they say, up to 100 dissidents were "disappeared" in Iran… Wasn't Ali Akbar Mohtashemi an interior minister after the revolution? Wasn't Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani the president when all those men were put to death? And isn't that the same Rafsanjani who is now a "reformist", aching, no doubt, to become speaker of the new pro-Khatami parliament?
So what is this new parliament going to look like? It may call itself "reformist" but - like a cup of tea that is steadily mixed with coffee - it may end up as neither…
