How Many Metres of Wall for 47 Years? — S. Rouzbeh

If one day we wanted to build a museum for the victims of 47 years of Islamic Republic rule, how large would it have to be?

Not to house all the documents, verdicts, films and witness accounts; just for one simple purpose: to put a small framed image of every person killed on the wall.

To understand the scale of the issue, not to establish the number of victims, let us make a simple assumption: if one day this centre held just 40,000 documented files, and we allowed each person a frame of about 20 by 25 centimetres, with a little space between the frames, we would need approximately 3,000 square metres of display surface. With a usable height of two and a half metres, the wall would be about 1,200 metres long.

One kilometre and 200 metres of wall.

Just for the photographs.

A view of the ‘Hall of Names’ at Yad Vashem — photographs of Holocaust victims

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But this article is not about the number of victims. The true figures must one day be established through documents, families, witnesses, archives and independent research. And the figures for secret and mass graves, and executions, will be much higher. But the more important issue is what society will do with the memory of these 47 years.

The experience of other countries, despite their historical differences, offers lessons. At Yad Vashem, the names and identities of Holocaust victims are recorded so that no individual is lost in a figure of millions. At Argentina’s ‘Memory Park’, the names of victims and the disappeared are recorded, and the information can still be supplemented. At ESMA, too, the former detention and torture site has itself become part of the historical record.

The Berlin Wall is another example. Sections of the wall that divided a city for nearly three decades are preserved today. Visitors do not see only remnants of concrete; they are confronted with questions: why was this wall built, how did a political system keep it standing, and what eventually brought it down?

The Iran of the future will need to ask such questions, too.

If a museum shows only who was killed, imprisoned or tortured, it will have fulfilled part of its duty. The more difficult task is to show how such things became possible.

How does political power become so concentrated that independent institutions lose the ability to restrain it? How does the law come to serve power instead of limiting it? How does official language normalise violence, and how does society gradually grow accustomed to something that was once unimaginable?

In the experience of the Islamic Republic, there is another question that cannot be ignored: what happens when political authority merges with religious authority, and the government’s decisions are presented as not only political, but also endowed with sacred legitimacy?

The lesson of this experience is not hostility towards religion. Many of the victims of this very government held religious beliefs themselves. The issue is not people’s faith; it is the conversion of religion into a source of political power and its placement in a position where it becomes difficult to criticise or constrain.

From this perspective, separating religious institutions from government is not merely a theoretical discussion about secularism; it is one of the lessons the experience of the Islamic Republic can leave to future generations: citizens must be free in their religious beliefs, but no religious institution should be exempt from accountability and limits on political power because of its sacred status.

So perhaps what Iran needs is not just a ‘museum’, but a museum and a National Memory Centre for Iran: a place for names and faces, and at the same time a centre for documents, oral testimonies, photographs, films and historical research into crimes, and so on.

Such a centre must not be a court or a museum of revenge. Determining individuals’ criminal responsibility is the task of an independent judiciary. The Memory Centre must distinguish between allegations, historical evidence and judicial verdicts, and must not make anyone’s place conditional on their political beliefs, religion, ethnicity, gender or affiliations: they were all free people and children of Iran.

All this memory need not be gathered in one building. Some prisons, detention centres and significant sites, if they are documented and can be protected, could themselves become “sites of memory”. Sometimes a real cell or an inscription left on a wall speaks more about the past than dozens of pages.

But in the main museum, perhaps there should be a different kind of wall; a wall that is deliberately left partly empty.

Above it, there would be just one inscription:

“Names we do not yet know.”

Years later, a family might come forward with a photograph; someone else might bring a document; a witness might record what they saw; or the opening of an archive might reveal the names of people who, until then, had appeared on no list.

Each time another victim’s identity is documented, one of those empty places would be given a name.

Such a museum must not pass hatred on to the next generation. Its task is more difficult: to pass on memory and awareness.

A child who might visit it fifty or a hundred years from now will not have experienced the Islamic Republic. That wall should confront them with a question more important than the past: How did society reach this point, and what mistakes did they make? What principles and institutions must be in place to ensure that it does not reach that point again?

At the beginning of this piece, we assumed there were forty thousand people, purely for the sake of a calculation, and arrived at a wall one kilometre and two hundred metres long.

But the real issue is not the length of the wall.

Behind every frame, a human being lived; they had a name and a family, loved and were loved, were a child, mother, father, spouse or partner, and had plans for the future.

Preserving those names is a debt we owe to the past; understanding why those frames were once placed on the wall is our responsibility to the future.

And perhaps the question is this:

What should Iran’s museum of memory show future generations so that Iran does not once again fall prey to a power that places itself beyond criticism, law and accountability?

S. Rouzbeh