The Mothers of Khavaran

The Place of the Damned

In the weeks after the killing stopped, the rumors began.

Families of political prisoners — women, mostly, because the men were dead or imprisoned — heard whispers: a site on the southeastern edge of Tehran, past the last houses, a stretch of barren ground near the city’s main cemetery. They went at night, or in the early morning, alone or in small groups, following directions passed through networks that could not be written down.

What they found at Khavaran was shallow soil disturbed in long, narrow rows. They knelt and dug with their hands. They found clothing. Fabric they recognized — a shirt, a blindfold. They found bones.¹ They found body parts that told them the burials had been hasty, the graves shallow, the bodies piled rather than laid.

They named the place La’nat-abad — the Place of the Damned. Not because the dead were damned, but because the ground itself seemed cursed — a stretch of earth that should have been a cemetery but was instead a crime scene disguised as emptiness.

Nobody told these women where to dig. Nobody gave them confirmation that their sons, husbands, brothers, or daughters had been executed. Many had received no notification at all — just silence, where there had once been prison visits, letters, or second-hand news through other inmates’ families. The silence itself was the first evidence. The shallow soil was the second. What they pulled from the ground with their fingernails was the third.

The Women Who Would Not Leave

The Mothers of Khavaran became a collective — not by organization but by persistence.

They returned to the site. Week after week, month after month, year after year. They gathered on Fridays, the day of communal mourning in Shia tradition, and on the anniversaries of the executions. They brought flowers. They sat on the ground near the place where they believed their relatives were buried. Some lit candles. Some read prayers. Some simply sat in silence, because there was nothing else to do in a country where the graves had no headstones, the dead had no official death certificates, and the state insisted that nothing had happened.

The regime’s response was consistent: harassment, beatings, arrests. Security forces dispersed the gatherings. Intelligence agents photographed the women and added their names to files. Some were interrogated. Some were imprisoned. The message was clear: mourning was an act of political defiance, and the state would treat it as such.

The women came back anyway. For three decades.

Consider what this requires. Not the courage of a single dramatic gesture — a protest, a confrontation, an act of public defiance that is witnessed and remembered. This was the courage of repetition. Showing up at the same patch of dirt every week, in a country where the security services know your name and the location of your house, knowing that today might be the day they arrest you — and showing up next week too. The Mothers of Khavaran did not stage a revolution. They staged a vigil. The vigil lasted longer than the regime’s patience.

The Woman Who Filed a Complaint

Maryam Akbari-Monfared was not at Khavaran. She was in prison.

Akbari-Monfared was serving a fifteen-year sentence in Evin Prison on charges related to moharebeh — the same charge used against the 1988 victims. In 2009, she did something that no one inside the Iranian prison system had done: she filed a formal legal complaint demanding an official investigation into the 1988 massacre — specifically, into the execution of her brother and sister.²

The complaint was addressed to the Iranian judiciary. It named the crime. It identified the perpetrators. It requested an investigation, accountability, and disclosure of burial locations.

The judiciary’s response was not to investigate the complaint. It was to punish the complainant. Akbari-Monfared was denied medical furlough. She was threatened with new charges. Her conditions of imprisonment were worsened. The regime’s message was explicit: the 1988 massacre was not a matter for inquiry. Asking about it was itself a crime.

Akbari-Monfared’s complaint is important not because it succeeded — it did not — but because it demonstrated that the regime’s strategy of erasure required ongoing enforcement. The dead could not be silenced permanently. Their relatives would not stop asking. And the state’s response — punishing a prisoner for filing a legal complaint about the murder of her siblings — revealed the ongoing nature of the crime more clearly than any external report could.

The Second Generation

Chowra Makaremi was a child when her mother was executed in 1988. Her grandmother — her mother’s mother — had kept a notebook throughout the period of imprisonment and execution. The notebook recorded what the grandmother witnessed: the prison visits that stopped, the phone calls that went unanswered, the bureaucratic denials, the whispered rumors, and finally the confirmation that came not from the state but from the ground at Khavaran.

Makaremi published the notebook as Aziz’s Notebook (Le Cahier d’Aziz) — a document that translates private grief into public evidence.³ The book does not argue a political case. It records what one family experienced when the state decided that their daughter, their sister, their mother was an enemy of God.

The regime understands the threat that the second generation represents. The children of the 1988 victims — now adults, many living in exile, some still in Iran — carry the memory that the state is trying to bury. They are authors, activists, researchers, and legal advocates. Some have testified at the Nouri trial in Sweden. Others maintain databases of victims’ names. The state’s response has been to extend its campaign of harassment to them — targeting not just the witnesses but their descendants, in an attempt to sever the chain of testimony.

This is the logic of enforced disappearance: the crime does not end with the killing. It extends through every subsequent act of concealment, denial, and intimidation. The state must continuously maintain the erasure. If it stops — if a grave is discovered, a name verified, a complaint filed, a book published — the crime surfaces. The Mothers of Khavaran and their children are the people who ensure it keeps surfacing.

The Bulldozers

Under international law, enforced disappearance is a continuous offense — it does not end with the act of killing but continues for as long as the fate of the disappeared remains unresolved. The mechanism is not just murder but the systematic destruction of every trail that leads back to it: records, graves, witnesses, and the families who refuse to stop asking. What the Islamic Republic did next at Khavaran was not a cover-up of a past crime. It was the crime’s latest phase.

In 2022, the regime escalated from denial to demolition.

Concrete walls were erected around Khavaran — not the low fences that had previously marked the site, but high walls that blocked the view and the access. The women who had been coming for three decades were physically prevented from reaching the graves. The walls did not change the reality of what lay beneath the soil. They changed the visibility.

In March 2024, Baha’i graves at the Khavaran site were destroyed. The Baha’i community — Iran’s largest religious minority, systematically persecuted since 1979 — had buried their dead at Khavaran because they were denied access to other cemeteries. The destruction of their graves was part of a broader campaign against the Baha’i community, but at Khavaran it served a dual purpose: it demonstrated the regime’s willingness to destroy burial evidence, and it tested the international response. The response was negligible.

Then came August 11, 2025.

Heavy machinery was deployed to Section 41 of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery — Tehran’s main burial ground, and a separate site from Khavaran where 1980s execution victims were interred. Excavators and bulldozers leveled the section. Tehran’s Deputy Mayor, Davoud Goodarzi, confirmed the demolition and stated the site would become a “parking lot.”⁴

A parking lot. On top of the bones of political prisoners executed without trial.

The forensic implications are precise. Section 41 contained osteological evidence — bones, teeth, skeletal remains — that could be used for DNA identification. It contained artifacts — clothing fragments, blindfolds, ropes — that corroborated execution methods described by survivors. It contained the physical proof that would allow families to know, with certainty, where their relatives are buried.

The bulldozers destroyed that proof. This was not urban development. It was the final phase of a crime that began with the killing, continued through the secret burials, extended through decades of denial, and now reaches its conclusion in the physical annihilation of evidence.

The Continuous Crime

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance — which Iran has not ratified, but which reflects customary international law — gives legal weight to what the Mothers of Khavaran have always understood: the crime clock does not start in 1988. It is still running. Every day the regime refuses to disclose burial locations, every day it denies families access to graves, every day it bulldozes evidence — it is committing the offense of enforced disappearance.

The Nouri trial in Sweden established a further legal principle: the executions constituted war crimes under the Geneva Conventions. Nouri was convicted and sentenced to life.⁵ In June 2024, he was released in a prisoner exchange — traded for a Swedish diplomat and an EU citizen held by Iran. He returned to Tehran, where he was received as a hero.

The exchange was a defeat for universal jurisdiction. A war criminal, convicted by a sovereign court after a two-year trial with full due process, walked free after less than five years. The message to other perpetrators was clear: commit the crime abroad if you must, but the regime will bring you home.

And yet: the verdict was not exchanged. It remains — a permanent, judicially validated record that the Corridor of Death existed, that the fatwa was real, that the “questioning” was a sham, and that the state executed prisoners without legal process. No Iranian court has investigated 1988. A Swedish court did. That record cannot be bulldozed.

What the Ground Remembers

The Islamic Republic has spent thirty-seven years trying to make the summer of 1988 disappear. It denied the killings. It harassed the families. It punished anyone who asked questions. It built walls. It sent bulldozers.

And still: a collective of women kept returning to a patch of dirt on the edge of Tehran, every week, for three decades. A prisoner filed a complaint from inside the system that killed her siblings. A granddaughter published a notebook. A Swedish court heard testimony and entered a verdict.

The regime’s anxiety about Khavaran is itself evidence. States do not build walls around parking lots. They do not deploy bulldozers at dawn to level sites that contain nothing of significance. They do not punish women for sitting on the ground and placing flowers on unmarked earth. The intensity of the erasure effort is proportional to the weight of what lies beneath.

The ground at Khavaran holds two things: bones, and the proof that the Islamic Republic was built on a crime it cannot acknowledge without destroying its own legitimacy. The Mothers of Khavaran understood this before any court, any human rights report, any international investigation. They understood it the first time they knelt in the dirt and dug with their hands.

The bones are still there. The mothers are still waiting. The regime is still afraid of what the ground remembers.

This article is a companion to The Summer of 1988. For the theological machinery that authorized the killing, see The Theology of Annihilation. For the forensic reconstruction of how prisoners were executed, see The Corridor of Death. For how the regime controls information about its crimes, see The Transparency Trap. For the women’s rights thread that connects 1906 to the present, see The Minister Who Was Hanged. To test what you know about Iran’s hidden history, take The Iran Test.

Mothers of Khavaran, documented testimony; Wikipedia, “Mothers of Khavaran,” accessed February 2026 ↩
JVMI (Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran), “Inquiry into the 1988 Mass Executions in Iran — Second Report,” 2017 ↩
Chowra Makaremi, Le Cahier d’Aziz (Aziz’s Notebook), published account of the 1988 massacre from a family’s perspective ↩
Iran 1988 Massacre Project, “Iranian Authorities Confirm Destruction of Graves of Executed Political Prisoners,” August 2025 ↩
Trial of Hamid Nouri, Stockholm District Court, Case No. B 1278-19, Verdict July 14, 2022; Atlantic Council, “The Pardoning and Release of a Convicted Iranian War Criminal Is a Crime,” June 2024 ↩