Out of Terror, Hope
By FRANCIS
One of the
profound disappointments of 2005 was the election in June of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as president
of
Eventually,
Omid
(which means "hope" in Farsi) is the work of a team led by two
sisters, trained as historians in France, Ladan and Roya Boroumand. Their father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, was a
lawyer who worked closely with Shapur Bakhtiar, the short-lived prime minister of
It is unknown
how many there are: The number reaches into the tens and possibly hundreds of
thousands, particularly if one counts those like the children sent to clear
land mines during the Iran-Iraq war. Omid is a
remarkable effort to document these victims as individuals, based on
careful research into publicly-available documents (mostly Iranian newspapers).
The database, based on software developed specifically to track human-rights
violations by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, now has nearly 10,000
people in it. A family member can search in either Farsi or English for a
particular name, and find out when that person was executed, what the charges
(if any) were, and how the killing violated internationally recognized
standards of human rights. Omid is non-partisan and
even-handed; it documents the killings of Savak
agents, Communists, members of the Mujahedeen-i-Khalq
(a leftist opposition group frequently accused of terrorism), and fellow-travelers who fell afoul of the clerics, as well as
ordinary criminals and prostitutes denied due process.
Browsing
through the database is a remarkable experience. The victims come from all
religions, nationalities and walks of life. There is the young girl who, by
swimming in a bathing suit in her pool at home, was found guilty of
"causing a state of arousal" in a neighbor
and was lashed to death. Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated Salman
Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" into Japanese,
was stabbed to death in
Omid is a
work in progress; the Boroumand sisters still have
thousands of cases yet to enter into the database. Friends and family members
of victims with more information will be able to update individual cases beyond
information that is publicly available. There are thousands of other victims,
unfortunately, for whom there is no record or evidence.
A project like Omid, it seems to me, has two important purposes. The first
is to remind the world about the kind of regime
But the
documenting of individual human rights abuses serves another goal. We become
inured to statistics about violence and human rights violations when the
numbers reach into the thousands and thousands; we fling the numbers around as
political footballs, forgetting that behind each one stands a father, daughter,
friend or colleague, each with a personal history. Some day, a future Iranian
regime will itself come to account with its past. Until then, the Internet has
given us a wonderful resource for remembering and hoping.
Mr.
Fukuyama, professor of International Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies, is author of "