A few weeks ago, we noted the unveiling of the Omid database - a website memorializing the civilians killed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The site was profiled by Francis Fukiyama in the Wall Street Journal:
Eventually, Iran will have to come to terms honestly with the moral legacy of its 1979 Islamic revolution -- just as former dictatorships in Chile, South Africa and El Salvador have done. The date of this reckoning has been put off indefinitely. But we have, in the interim, an important effort to set that record straight, in the form of Omid, a Web site that comes online today and documents the individual stories of the victims of the Iranian regime.
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 Iran appointed at the end of the Shah's rule who sought to liberalize the monarchy. When Bakhtiar was forced out by Ayatollah Khomeini, he and Boroumand went into exile in France. Both men were assassinated by agents of the Iranian regime in Paris in the early 1990s. Omid started as an effort to memorialize not just them, but all of the victims of the mullahs' regime.
...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.
Read the whole thing. Also, check out the profile of the Boroumond sisters in the Washington Post:
The project that endangers them is also one they found psychologically necessary. "When you are a witness to something terrible and you don't do anything about it, you are ashamed," explains Ladan. "How many nightmares I had: My father is in prison, and I cannot get to him, I cannot bring him food. . . . Since we started this project, I feel calmer." They believe that thousands of Iranians are consumed by the same shame and will want to help build this online archive -- or even someday, in a democratic Iran, a real victims' archive.
In their more optimistic moments, the Boroumands also hope that the mere act of participating in the project will remind Iranians that even in a totalitarian society, people are not entirely powerless. They can remember crimes, they can name the perpetrators and they can try to hold them to account.
The Boroumond sisters have produced a momumental memorial. Merci! and Mubarak!
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Posted by: Twicelove | January 04, 2010 at 07:08 AM
My bro am loving your posts. Found you on Twitter.
Anyway, I felt it was about time I posted
Ciao
Posted by: californian | July 20, 2010 at 10:53 PM