Hassan Zia-Zarifi

Hassan Zia-Zarifi (Persian: حسن ضیاظریفی‎‎; 1939 – 1975) was an Iranian intellectual and one of the ideological founders of the communist guerrilla movement in Iran.

Hassan Zia-Zarifi was executed extrajudicially along with eight others while in prison in Tehran on April 18, 1975. The execution generated tremendous internal and foreign criticism against the increasingly oppressive government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and helped cement its reputation as a serious violator of human rights.

By the time of his execution, the small group Zia-Zarifi had helped form along with Bijan Jazani had developed into the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas, who posed a serious challenge to the Shah’s government.

Hassan Zia-Zarifi was born in Lahijan, in the northern province of Gilan, on April 10, 1939, the second youngest of eight children of Hajji Issa Zia-Zarifi, a merchant, and Rokhsareh Monajjemi. His father was a religious man but Hassan was mostly influenced by his older brothers, who were active in leftist causes.

He entered the law faculty of the University of Tehran in 1960. He graduated in 1963 and was immediately conscripted and served two years of mandatory military service. Although as a university graduate he should have served as an officer, he served as a private due to his record of political activity. After the end of his service, he went to work in the Behshahr cooking oil company. In 1967, he took a position as an intern in a legal office.

He had little time for a personal life. He was apparently in love with a young woman at the time, but his political activity did not permit him to pursue his social life. He was arrested in 1967 and convicted by a military tribunal to ten years in prison. In 1973, he was retried in the wake of the assault on the Siahkal gendarmerie station and given the death penalty. The sentence was commuted to life in prison, but he was killed in prison by members of SAVAK, the Shah’s feared intelligence service, in 1975.

Hassan Zia-Zarifi began his political activism as a young boy, inspired by the more permissive political environment in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the movement to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. He organized demonstrations and boycotts in high school, protesting the poor school conditions and harsh treatment of students by teachers. He joined the youth wing of the Tudeh Party in 1953, shortly before the CIA-engineered coup d’etat of August 18, 1953, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq.

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