Fifteen years ago, I used to purchase goods from a factory owned by a man named Haj Taghi. One afternoon, while sitting in my office, Haj Taghi called. He said, “Mr. Mahdavifar, there is an outstanding amount on your account, won’t you pay us?”
I asked, “How much is it, Haj Agha?”
He replied, “Five hundred and fifty thousand tomans.”
Confident that there was a mistake with my account and certain that my debt wasn’t that much, I thought to myself that perhaps I had paid the factory, but they hadn’t recorded it. I had a habit of not asking for a receipt when I paid them. So, I told Haj Taghi over the phone, “Haj Agha, I’ll be there shortly.”
Without delay, I called a taxi. About ten minutes later, I arrived at Haj Taghi’s factory and went straight to his office.
When I opened the door, Haj Taghi, two of his sons, and his accountant were gathered in the room. As soon as they saw me, they all began to laugh.
Haj Taghi said, “Your account is just over two hundred and a bit, but I intentionally announced a higher figure to make you rush over here to defend your true account.”
I told my sons and my accountant, “I’m going to say something over the phone to Mahdavifar that will make him quickly come here himself.” The children’s laughter was because my prediction about your coming turned out to be correct.
The purpose of sharing this memory is to say that Ayatollah Montazeri, regarding the executions in Mordad 1367 [July-August 1988], says: “I don’t know if 2800 or 3800 people were executed in that event.”
The number was so large that Ayatollah Montazeri recalls an approximate figure of a thousand more or less.
A few days ago, while I was interviewing with Radio Pars, the radio host asked me about the executions of 67 [1988]. After I answered, the host reminded me that Mr. Maleki, in a previous interview with the same radio station, announced the statistics of the executions of 67 as thirty thousand. Nevertheless, the radio host insisted that the number of executions was higher and could be estimated at up to one hundred and fifty thousand.
Perhaps in the future, this one hundred and fifty thousand figure will be accepted by historians, and this will be written in history. Then, perhaps, someday, a fly might land next to the zeroes of this figure and add another zero, and from then on, historians will mention the number of executions in the year 67 as one million and five hundred thousand.
The interesting thing is that the puzzle of the executions is well known to the leaders of the country. Mr. Ebrahim Raisi, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, and Hossein-Ali Nayeri, the main agents of the executions of 67, are well-aware of the quantity and quality of the executions. In such times, they should take a taxi themselves and rush over to defend the accurate number and statistics. But why they don’t come forward now, and why they don’t make themselves visible on this matter, can have two reasons according to me.
1) The first reason is that, for them, once you’re in deep, it doesn’t matter if it’s one foot or a hundred feet. Since we’ve killed, what difference does it make? Now a thousand or a hundred thousand…
2) The second reason could be that perhaps they themselves suffer from these confusing statistics and wish to come forward, say in front of a television camera, and declare, “By God, we didn’t kill that many, but we killed this much.”
But saying this is not easy. How can they come, look people in the eye, look the world in the eye, and look into the eyes of grieving families and say, for example, “We didn’t kill fifty thousand, we only killed five thousand.” Put yourself in their place.
No, no,
God forbid you be in their place.