The Mass Murderer Who Will be Iran’s Next President

BY SHAMMAI SISKIND

ON THE MORNING of Saturday, June 19, Iranians awoke to learn the identity of who their next president would be.

The initial polls had proved correct.

With over seventy-two percent of the total vote, Ebrahim Raisi, the current Chief Justice of Iran and head of the country’s court system, was named president-elect. As per Iranian law, he will assume office in early August.

Who is Ebrahim Raisi?

Raisi is a unique figure in Iranian politics. Making the bulk of his career in the country’s judiciary, he has for decades been known as a staunch supporter of the regime as well as a hardliner on nearly every policy area from foreign relations to domestic issues.

But Raisi is not just another run-of-themill Revolutionary loyalist – something that is more or less a prerequisite for advancement in Iran’s government. Raisi is perhaps the government official with the most bureaucratic and political experience in the country. To put it succinctly, Raisi is the biggest regime insider in Iran today.

Raisi’s introduction into government began when he was a mere nineteen years old. The young Raisi, scion of a prestigious clerical family, was groomed for religious leadership from his early years. He attended seminary in Qom, a prominent center of Shiite learning. He later attended Shahid Motahari University in Tehran, where he received a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence and law. In 1979, Raisi participated in the Revolution, which toppled the Western-backed Shah.

Allegedly, it was shortly after the Revolution that Raisi was “scouted” by a close aide of the Revolution’s ideological leader and newly seated Supreme Leader of Iran Rohullah Khamenei. While the Revolution had succeeded in deposing the Shah, the fledgling Islamic Republic faced a number of immediate challenges. These included the Western-educated loyalists of the Shah who were, to put it lightly, not exactly thrilled about living under a radical Shiite theocracy.

Other factional groups, long a feature of Iran’s traditionally rich political spectrum, included secularist left-wing dissidents and ethnic separatist movements, all of whom posed serious threats to the Revolution’s political hegemony. At the same time, an all-out war with neighboring Iraq began almost immediately. The conflict, which would turn into an almost unimaginable bloody eight-year war of attrition, quickly became a huge strain on Iran’s resources and threatened the Ayatollah’s hold on power.

It was against this backdrop that Raisi was recruited to the nascent regime. The aging leaders of the new regime were looking for young and headstrong individuals, with dedication to the cause who would keep the new power machine running and solidify the Revolution’s control.

By the age of 21, Raisi was already awarded his first judicial appointment as the prosecutor of Karaj, a suburb of Tehran. Despite his youth, Raisi quickly ascended the ranks. He was soon appointed as Prosecutor of Hamadan City while simultaneously serving his role in Karaj. Shortly after, Raisi became the chief prosecutor for all of Hamadan province. As Raisi quickly became one of the most experienced jurists in the country, he was eventually tapped for promotion to the central judiciary establishment. In 1985, when he was barely 25 years old, Raisi became the assistant prosecutor in the country’s capital of Tehran. During this period, Raisi oversaw hundreds of cases, a large portion of which involved capital cases against political dissidents.

These years of meting out harsh sentences to untold numbers of Iranians were merely preparation for Raisi’s most infamous participation in Iranian government brutality, an event that became known as the 1988 Prisoner’s Massacre.

At the height of the Iran-Iraq War, the authorities used the conflict to create a climate in which dissent was not tolerated. Any criticism of state policy, even in fields not directly related to the war, was portrayed as betrayal of the state. With this pretext in place, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a series of secret orders for the execution of political prisoners. A special sixteen-member committee was established to oversee the process, which

included Khomeini himself, the heads of the Justice and Intelligence Ministries, and other senior prosecutors. According to several NGOs that investigated the episode, including Amnesty International and the Center for Human Rights in Iran, the actual death sentences themselves were overseen by a fourman commission, later known as the “death committee.” Assistant Prosecutor Raisi, then 28 years old, was given the honor of sitting on this prestigious panel.

The “trials” for the thousands of dissidents, mostly from left wing secular political groups, came in the form of questionnaires regarding their commitment to opposition factions and Shiite Islam. Most of the prisoners being asked these strange questions, such as “will you denounce your colleagues on the record?” or “would you share a prison cell with a non-Muslim” did not even know why they were being posed. Those who gave a sufficient number of wrong answers were quickly carted off to remote areas, predominately in Iran’s southwest, where they were hanged or shot.

Nearly all of this activity took place in complete secrecy. Barely any rumors were able to escape the swift implication of Khomeini’s fatwa. It was only in late July 1988 that the public began to notice the thousands of political prisoners that had gone missing across Iran. Eventually, proof began to emerge of their fate. One of the first was the discovery of an unmarked mass grave in an abandoned area known as the Khavaran in the southeast of Tehran. More indications of the murders came to light as family members throughout the country attempted to visit their imprisoned relatives only to find their cells empty or be simply denied entry by prison guards. Soon live reports of survivors – individuals who had been imprisoned along with condemned comrades but for various reasons had fallen through the cracks and were released – made their way to the public.

Still, it was difficult to discuss the massacre in public. Crackdown by the regime continued to intensify, and demanding an investigation into alleged government malfeasance was a risk few were willing to undertake. It was not until 2014 that a former advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, activist and filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad, publicly denounced the regime for its role in the massacre.

“Due to purposeful silence and state red lines,” wrote Nourizad, the events of 1988 have “never been cited in official [reports].”

The revelation by Nourizad that a staggering 33,000 people were killed during the purge was strong confirmation of what Iranian activist groups and human rights organizations around the world had suspected for years.

In the three decades following the massacre, Raisi continued his meteoric ascent in the Iranian bureaucracy. Shortly afterwards, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini died and was replaced by Ali Khamenei. The new Supreme Leader took a personal liking to Raisi, and the assistant prosecutor’s career skyrocketed. He became chief prosecutor of Tehran, and then headed the General Inspectors Office, a regulatory agency in charge of the entire executive branch of Iran’s government. Finally, in 2019, Raisi reached the pinnacle of the state judiciary when he was appointed Chief Justice, a position which includes heading the country’s Supreme Court and running the judiciary system.

The Sham

Needless to say, Raisi’s distinguished career made him the quintessential hardliner in the eyes of the regime – and the ideal candidate to replace the incumbent Hassan Rouhani, widely perceived as a “soft” moderate.

Leading up to the election, the government began to take steps to ensure Raisi’s victory. To do this, there were several mechanisms at the state’s disposal. First and foremost was the ability to eliminate the competition. While Iran’s presidential election is technically decided by democratic popular vote, candidates are allowed to run only after being approved by an unelected body subservient to the Supreme Leader called the Guardian Council. On May 25, just weeks prior to election day, the Council announced that the vast majority of candidates – literally hundreds of hopefuls – had been disqualified, leaving just seven men eligible to run. The list of those invalidated contained several highly experienced politicians who have long been known to the public and ran on reformist platforms. These included Supreme Leader advisor and former parliament speaker Ali Larijani – a pragmatist conservative who had veered more to the center in recent years – and current reformist First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri.

Which brings us to the significance of the recent election results. Actions such as the Guardian Council’s mass disqualification of progressive candidates and covert threats against Raisi’s challengers convinced the majority of Iranians that the election process was merely for show. It is hardly surprising that the June 18th election had the lowest turnout in the country’s history, a pitiful forty-eight percent compared to more than seventy percent for the previous vote in 2017.

Far from an opportunity to let the people speak, the recent election was simply the framework for the regime to install its preferred actor. The question is, aside for being a poster-child true believer in the regime, what is it about Raisi’s stances and positions that

Raisi during the Iran-Iraq War

Raisi was Khamenei’s student of the highest grade at the Kharej seminary for 14 years

Some faces of those murdered in the 1988 Prison Massacre in Iran

It was only in late July 1988 that the public began to notice the thousands of political prisoners that had gone missing across Iran.

Raisi visiting Hezbollah’s military positions in southern Lebanon in 2018

Honoring Qassem Soleimani, the eliminated head of the IRGC Quds Force, in 2018

Raisi, center, and President Hassan Rouhani, second from right, greeting Ayatolleh Ali Khamenei in 2020

Only a hawkish conservative can be allowed to make peace with the West and perhaps offer some “token concessions” in the process.

make him so preferable?

The answer lies in the utterly desperate state of affairs in today’s Iran.

The Deal on the Table

It is difficult to imagine a more perfect storm of disasters than the one Iran has gone through over the past several years. Since the unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal by the Trump administration in 2018, the re-imposed sanctions have wreaked absolute havoc on the Iranian population and have almost completely drained state resources. The county’s most vital industries, especially its cash-generating energy sector, have taken unprecedented hits, falling to half the production levels of pre-sanction years.

At the monetary level, the Iranian rial has lost about half of its value over the past two years, making the acquisition of vital necessities nearly impossible for much of the population. Unemployment has surged to an estimated six million, constituting nearly a quarter of the country’s workforce. Sharpening economic woes has been the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, a health crisis that had spiraled out of control by mid-2020. The fast deterioration of the pandemic has been widely attributed to the government’s poor management, inept health policy, and disinformation – sometimes involving outright censorship of vital health-related information.

Adding to the government’s instability has been the rampant corruption of state institutions, a phenomenon that has become so obvious over the recent period that elected officials now discuss it openly and publicly. Raisi himself promised during his campaign to “cut off the arms” of all corrupt officials – a bit ironic considering there are few men alive that have contributed as much to Iran’s crooked bureaucratic machine as Ebrahim Raisi.

Indeed, the situation has become so bad, that even the staunchest hardliners have been forced to a bitter conclusion: the only hope of rehabilitating the country is to introduce serious change. First on the list is coming to an agreement with the Americans and putting an end to the dreaded sanctions that have been slowly strangling the country to death.

However, as all Iranian leaders are well aware, achieving this will require compromising with the “Great Satan,” which is the United States. While all state elites, including Ayatollah Khamenei, have reportedly signed off on a renewed nuclear deal, it is essential for the regime’s standing to not appear that it is going into such an agreement from a place of weakness. Doing so would fuel the growing progressive agenda in Iran – one that has triggered countrywide protest movements several times in the recent period and gained tremendous political traction, especially among the younger generation. Only a hawkish conservative can be allowed to make peace with the West and perhaps offer some “token concessions” in the process.

But even now that Raisi is in the seat of power, walking this tightrope of appearing strong while simultaneously acquiescing to U.S. demands will be challenging, if not impossible. While Raisi is facing an administration eager to lock in a deal, there are certain considerations the Americans cannot ignore – even if they would like to. Joe Biden and his team, nearly all of whom were intimately involved in the first iteration of the Iran deal, reluctantly understand that there are problems with the Islamic Republic outside of the nuclear issue. Years of Iranian-backed militias killing American troops in Iraq and Syria, Tehran’s proxies attacking its Gulf allies, and the fast pace construction of a stateof-the-art ballistic missile program are added factors to the equation. The U.S. cannot let Iran off the hook simply for ending its nuclear activities. Numerous administration officials have already signaled this in one form or another, from Biden’s press secretary to the president’s own pick for heading the Defense Department.

The problem, though, is that Raisi has been quite adamant that outside the narrowly defined parameters of Iran’s nuclear activities, there is nothing else up for discussion.

“We emphasize that the U.S. government should be sincere towards its commitments while noting that the regional and missile issues are not negotiable,” said Raisi during a press conference on June 21.

Of course, when Raisi cites “regional issues” he is referring to the full gamut of Iran’s militant supporting activities, from funding Hezbollah, to sending missiles to the Yemen-based Houthis, to funneling money to Hamas leaders in Gaza and Qatar.

As talks between Iranian and American negotiators continue behind closed doors in Vienna, it is looking increasingly unlikely any deal can be reached without one side breaking explicit commitments. On the U.S. side, this puts the administration into a precarious and, to put it bluntly, frustrating position. One of Biden’s most lauded campaign promises on foreign policy was reviving the Iran pact. He has repeatedly signaled his sincere desire to come to an understanding. What many in the administration are likely thinking right now is something to the tune of: Why would the Iranians send us a crazy hardliner to deal with after we’ve bent over backwards to make this work?

There is no question Iran now stands at a critical impasse. How much regime high-ups will be willing to accede will in the end be the determining factor.