Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Dariush Forouhar
داریوش فروهر
1928–1998 · 28 years ago
- Born
- 28 December 1928
- Taken
- 22 November 1998
- Age
- 69 years old
- From
- Tehran, Tehran
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Dariush Forouhar was born in Isfahan in 1928 and was drawn to politics in high school. As a law student at Tehran University he spoke out for the nationalisation of oil, and in 1951 he helped found the Iran Nation Party, which stood behind Mohammad Mossadegh. Under the Shah he was arrested again and again and spent some 14 years in prison in all.
After 1979 he was briefly minister of labour; his family credits him with unemployment benefits and a higher minimum wage. He resigned that same year, and in 1982 the new regime jailed him in Evin, which he said was harder than all his years in the Shah's prisons.
With his wife Parvaneh he argued openly for a democratic Iran and the separation of religion and state, and in the late 1990s their ideas drew a new generation of pro-democracy students.
How the regime took them
On 22 November 1998 Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar were found stabbed to death in their home in Tehran, killed by agents of the Islamic Republic's Ministry of Intelligence. Their deaths opened what became known as the chain murders: within weeks the writers Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh were killed too.
In January 1999 the Ministry of Intelligence admitted that some of its own officials were involved, but blamed 'rogue elements'. A closed military trial followed; the families refused to attend, saying the people who gave the orders were never investigated. Thousands came to the couple's funeral in spite of the security forces. (The Boroumand Center gives his age as 70; his birth date makes it 69.)
