ELECTIONS-2009 SUMMARY

Presidential elections were held in Iran on June 12, 2009, following a campaign in which opposition candidate Mir Houssain Moussavi was able to mobilize large crowds. On June 13 the current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that he won his reelection with well over 60% of the votes. Voter turnout was at a record high with above 80%. Studies such as one conducted by professors at Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at University of St. Andrews, Scotland found major discrepancies in the elections, forcing the government in Iran to acknowledge that voter participation was above 100 % in some communities. International observers were not allowed and domestic observes were very limited. There was no breakdown of the vote by province and the voting patterns were identical everywhere, which is an impossibility. Neither Moussavi nor the other candidate Mehdi Karoubi accepted the official election results. Iran scholar Gary Sick talks about a “political coup” and writes in his blog Gary’s Choice: “The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran’s Islamic revolution. All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran’s leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power.”

The days following the elections saw the largest protests in Iran since the 1979 revolution. Reese Erlich wrote in Common Dreams on June 29: “Based on my observations, no one was leading the demonstrations. During the course of the week after the elections, the mass movement evolved from one protesting vote fraud into one calling for much broader freedoms. You could see it in the changing composition of the marches. There were not only upper middle class kids in tight jeans and designer sunglasses. There were growing numbers of workers and women in very conservative chadors.” Protests are not limited to Tehran but erupted all over the country. Women, who make up the majority of university graduates, are on the forefront of the protest movement. The protests are largely non-violent, sometimes silent. Some photo and video footage show protesters helping and protecting policemen. People continue to go to their rooftops at night and shout “Allah-o-Akbar” (“God is great” and “There is no God but God,” which challenges the ultimate authority of the regime) and other slogans such as “Death to the dictatorship.” The color green became the unifying code among protesters, whose demands include better economic opportunities and improved human, civil and women’s rights. The government responded by having police and militia assault and arrest protesters in large numbers. Some of the killings, such as the dead of a young woman named “Neda” that was captured on video, resulted from protestors being shot from rooftops.

In an environment where phone text messaging was disabled, cell phones only work sporadically, phone connections to other countries are blocked, many internet websites are filtered, parasite signals interfere with certain satellite TV channels, journalists were arrested and foreign journalists are not allowed to report from inside Iran, the citizens of Iran became journalists by posting videos, photos and news on social networking sites, using the high-tech skills of a population whose majority is very young and media savvy.

Iranian American scholars like Reza Aslan and Hamid Dabashi have warned the US government to not get involved directly, given a history that includes a CIA coup against a democratically elected government in Iran and the US support for Iraq during a 9 year Iran/Iraq war. Direct US meddling will fuel the eagerness of the Iranian regime to find outsiders to blame. Dabashi wrote on 6/30 for CNN that US government funds for Iran will be abused by and benefit only “expatriate and entirely discredited opposition groups such as monarchist supporters of Reza Pahlavi and the Mohajedin Khalk organization” and that a movement that has been in the making for decades does not need American money or military operations to sustain itself.

Citizen to citizen solidarity can be very helpful. Here are a few things you can do:

- Stay informed. Go to blogs such as http://niacblog.wordpress.com for the latest updates.

- Become active with Iranian Americans in your community. In Portland you can connect with http://portlandstandswithiran.org Print the “Portland Stands with Iran” poster from this site and display it in your house, your car and your favorite stores!

- Support international campaigns such as those conducted by Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/iran   or Avaaz   https://secure.avaaz.org/en/iran_stop_the_crackdown

FAQ regarding the Green Wave Movement for Democracy in Iran

Were the elections rigged - any evidence? Does it even matter now?

The elections could have been rigged according to many sources but there is no smoking gun to point to. There are several statistical analyses that show the outcome as reported by the Interior Ministry to be very unlikely, if not impossible.  The second question is more important, because what happened before and during the campaign turned the elections into an elimination game that requires one of two sides of the regime to be defeated to the point of non-existence.  On one side there is a faction of the ruling elite that wants to remove the concept of republicanism from the constitution and turn Iran into a full theocratic Islamic state, on other side there is a faction that is committed to Ayatollah Khomeini’s notion of the Islamic Republic with the entire theocratic nuisance that it is.

Who supports Mousavi and who supports Ahmadinejad? Is there a class war?

The line of ideological divide goes through layers of class, layers of generation and layers of gender.  It may be challenging to admit that the poor and the rich are divided between the two factions of ruling elite, but facts on the ground indicate that the myth that poor and rural populations supports Ahmadinejad is not quite true. The myth that all young people are Mousavi supporters is similarly simplistic. 

Who has benefited the most from President Ahmadinejad’s term in office?

Ahmadinejad, with his populist agenda, tried to distribute Iran’s unprecedented revenues from oil sales among the poor and working class without any economic plan to counter the inflation.  Consequently what was distributed as loans or increase in salaries and pensions to retirees in turn increased the cost of living for everybody.  Additionally, he allowed the hands of his supporters, specifically the military and revolutionary guard’s commanders, to invest in the country’s economic sector so that now a large percentage of the industries are owned by the military and intelligence apparatus.  Appointing Islamic Revolutionary Guardsmen to government’s civil posts created an unprecedented intrusion into financial institutions by the military, whereby any threat to his presidency in effect can be perceived as a threat to the vitality of the armed forces.

Because of these mistakes, labor unions and progressive Iranians are almost entirely on the side of the opposition to Ahmadinejad.  The teachers union, the bus drivers union, the autoworkers unions, and the sugar agro industry of haft tappeh are among those who been on strike during the last year. Many of their leaders, including Massoud Ossanlo, the speaker of the Bus Drivers Union, are still in prison after being rounded up at a May First rally.

Is the CIA meddling with the situation in Iran to overthrow the government? Was the CIA involved with the current Green Movement in Iran?

The answer to the first question is an absolute YES, there is no doubt that personnel of the CIA and the US Defense Special Project are at work in training and providing material support to ethnic separatists in SE Baluchistan, NW Kurdistan and SW Khuzestan.  Symore Hersh has written extensively about these connections and covert operations.  The Peoples Mujahedin Khalgh (a.k.a. MEK, MKO), a guerilla organization that is on the US and EU terrorist list, is also under supervision of the American forces in Iraq.

The answer to the second question, however, is a resounding NO.  As indicated by Reese Erlich, who was in Iran during the elections, there is no reason to believe that such relation existed in the current movement.  Erlich states in his Common Dreams article from June 29th, 2009: “Some of these authors have even cited my book, ‘The Iran Agenda,’ as a source to prove U.S. meddling. …They mostly argue by analogy. They correctly cite numerous examples of CIA efforts to overthrow governments, sometimes by manipulating mass demonstrations. But past practice is no proof that it's happening in this particular case. Frankly, the multi-class character of the most recent demonstrations, which arose quickly and spontaneously, were beyond the control of the reformist leaders in Iran, let alone the CIA.“ 

What are the URGENT goals of the Iranian Green Wave Movement?

•    Immediate halt to the violence and to the persecution of the movement participants and leaders

•    Release of all detainees of the recent demonstration and other political prisoners

•    Establishment of laws and policies that guarantee democratic civil rights for all, including but not limited to women’s rights, freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly, as guaranteed per article 27 of the Iranian constitution.