Casualties of The Monarchy
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, stated that "60,000 men, women and children were martyred by the Shah's regime," and this number appears in the constitution of the Islamic Republic. A larger number of "70,000 martyrs and 100,000 wounded ... fought to destroy the rotten monarchy," has been given by a member of the Iranian parliament.
More recently, tabulation by Emad al Din Baghi, a researcher at the Martyrs Foundation (Bonyad Shahid) found a far lower number of casualties. Baghi found that between 1963 and 1979, there were 3164 dead among the anti-Shah movement. In Iran, the Martyrs Foundation, established after the revolution to compensate the survivors of fallen revolutionaries, could identify only 744 martyrs in Tehran, where the majority of the casualties were supposed to have occurred. The coroner's office and Tehran's main cemetery, Behesht-e Zahra, counted 895 and 768 martyrs, respectively.
Read more about this topic: Casualties Of The Iranian Revolution
Famous quotes containing the word monarchy:
“A monarchy is the most expensive of all forms of government, the regal state requiring a costly parade, and he who depends on his own power to rule, must strengthen that power by bribing the active and enterprising whom he cannot intimidate.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)