April 18th, 1991, was a sunny spring day in the French capital, during a month in that city made famous in song. About midday, a 65-year-old man was parking his car in front of the building where he was living with his family. He had just come from a meeting with his native country’s former prime minister, the Iranian prodemocracy leader Shapur Bakhtiar. The man’s 19-year-old son, looking through the window from inside their apartment, noted his father’s return and headed toward the kitchen to serve lunch. But his father never made it home. In the lobby of his building, a person (or persons) “unknown” stabbed him to death.
That is how the idea of an online memorial dedicated to the victims of the Iranian state took root in our mind. It is a memorial dedicated to all victims, not just to our father, for our father gave his life for the rights of all. Omid (it means “hope” in Persian) was the name that we chose for this memorial project. Omid’s goal is to systematically catalogue and document—to the greatest extent possible in every case, through all the records and eyewitness testimony that can be gathered—the story of each and every person whom the Islamic Republic has killed, and to create a file in both Persian and English that will serve as a virtual memorial to them, one that will enshrine their stories and record their ordeals
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