During my first trip to Iran in 1996, I visited Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s tomb, a palatial complex abutting a Behesht-e Zahra Iran-Iraq War cemetery about 14 miles south of Tehran. Like many Shiite shrines, it was airy and beautiful. Khomeini’s sarcophagus lay in the center of the complex behind an elaborate silver gate. Iranian pilgrims would push rial — at the time worth something — into his resting area as donations for the shrine and various Shiite causes.
Three years later, I returned, and the silver gate was plexiglassed over. I asked a guard what happened. He said Iranians were putting dog feces in rial notes and contaminating the area. Other donation boxes were further back, but they were largely empty.
It would violate international law to destroy Khomeini’s tomb during war. During the 2003 Iraq War, Pentagon planners asked their counsel about the legality of destroying statues of leader Saddam Hussein. The idea would be to signal to Iraqis that the United States sought to attack Saddam’s regime, not Iraqis themselves. The lawyers responded that the statues represented cultural heritage and could not be touched.
The U.S. — or post-regime change Iranian leadership — need not preserve Khomeini’s shrine following the Islamic Republic’s fall, at least not in the context in which it sits now. While today, the regime seeks to use the gold-plated facility to honor itself, any future regime should do the opposite. Khomeini’s shrine should become a museum and conference center documenting the tyranny of Khomeini, his successor, the now-deceased Ali Khamenei, and an exhibit hall to commemorate all those whom the regime murdered.
If the regime brings school children now to honor Khomeini, and Basiji paramilitaries visit as part of their indoctrination, why not bring a new generation of students to unlearn Khomeini’s propaganda? They can see exhibits on the murder of Iranian Kurds, up to and including Jina “Mahsa” Amini, whose death sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Survivors of Evin Prison can describe their experiences inside it.
Perhaps a portion of the huge facility can become a repository for documents and personnel records related to the regime, and as a study center to access those that the U.S. and the new regime have digitized. Here, it is important that the CIA not try to spirit away the documents as they tried to do in Iraq. After 47 years of regime tyranny, they should be accessible to everyone. Transparency is a virtue, not a vulnerability.
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As for Khomeini’s tomb, it need not remain the focal point or the prime exhibit. Though Saddam started the Iran-Iraq War by invading Iran in 1980, Khomeini’s policies contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ordinary conscripts in the years that followed. He should be buried among them, in an ordinary grave.
After decades of terrorism, Iranians say “never again.” But as with both Holocaust denial in Europe and Saddam revisionism in Iraq, new generations forget or embrace willful ignorance. Education is crucial. Fortunately, the Islamic Republic has already created the facility to direct that study and display. There could be no more fitting symbolic end to the regime than repurposing Khomeini’s tomb complex into the headquarters for the study of his evil.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.