Website Documenting Iranian Atrocities

Anne Applebaum links to a website created by two expatriate Iranian sisters in which they bravely document human rights atrocities that have occurred and are still occurring in Iran. Browse the Memorial and you'll find over 9000 names - and growing.

"A nurse in Iranian Kurdistan in 1980…
...She encouraged two French journalists to report on the "butchery" they had witnessed. She hoped that international intervention would stop the Iranian army from shooting at ambulances and would allow the delivery of urgently needed medical supplies. She was arrested and charged with making "counter-revolutionary" comments published in a foreign newspaper. Executed on June 17, she was thirty years old".

"A young girl in Tehran in 1981…
...Arrested for swimming in her home pool in a bathing suit, she was found guilty of causing "a state of sexual arousal" in a neighbor from whose house she could be seen. She was sentenced to sixty lashes in April 1981, but she died after the thirtieth lash."

"Atefeh Rajabi , a 16-year-old schoolgirl: Executed by hanging in Neka, Aug. 15, 2004, for "acts incompatible with chastity."

The purpose of the site?

"At the minimum," Ladan says, "we are creating a database which academics and scholars will find useful. At the maximum, we start a real public debate about the regime's crimes in Iran -- and ultimately about accountability, due process and democracy."

Let's go for the max!