Laura Secor: Iran’s Stolen Election
At the Grand Hyatt hotel in midtown Manhattan on Friday, a decorous LCD placard outside a ballroom, the sort that might have announced the name of a session at a conference of anthropologists or oral surgeons, read, “The Islamic Republic of Iran: Elections, 7 A.M. to 9 P.M.” On the way to the hotel, I’d swapped headscarves with an Iranian friend. The one she’d brought was green, the official color of the campaign of the reformist presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi, and she had heard that in Tehran, it was forbidden to wear green inside the polling places. But at the Grand Hyatt, there were no headscarves to be seen, and plenty of green.
The ballroom was nearly empty when we arrived at 3:30 P.M., except for a table staffed by three Iranian-Americans, one of whom assured us that they were volunteers, not employees of the Iranian government. That would explain the lack of compulsory hijab. He said he’d seen about five-hundred voters so far, and he estimated that seventy-five per cent of them were young people. Our little group included a thirty-year-old man and three women in their twenties. “Iran has a bright future,” the volunteer told us in avuncular tones, “with so many young people getting involved.” My friends filled out their ballots. Three were voting for Mousavi, one for the other reformist in the race, Mehdi Karroubi.
We loitered outside the ballroom, where two Iranian journalists sat on the floor glued to their Blackberries, looking for Facebook updates from Iran. The ballroom was filling up. A leggy young woman entered in a green tank top and white hot pants, to a burst of appreciative laughter and a flurry of photographs. Iranian sweets called gaz appeared on the refreshments table. They were green, one voter pointed out, for Mousavi, and white, for Karroubi. Another, mocking President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 campaign promise to bring oil to the people’s supper tables, said, “This is the gaz Ahmadinejad has brought to our tables.”
From 3:30 P.M. until 4:15 P.M., the scene at the Hyatt was festive, despite the news earlier in the day that the reformist headquarters had been sacked and prominent reformists arrested. Everyone had a story about a relative who had never voted before, who was a royalist or an all-purpose skeptic, who was wearing green in the streets or simply casting a vote for Mousavi. There was only one way this could go. Turnout, we heard, was over eighty per cent.
But then the first ominous Facebook update came in. The Ministry of Interior had announced that of twenty-five million votes counted thus far, sixteen million were for Ahmadinejad. The time, in Tehran, was just past midnight. The polls in the cities had just closed. It was not time to panic yet; maybe this was just the rural vote. But the mood in our little circle darkened. It wasn’t true, came another update; only five million had been counted, and of them, both candidates were claiming sixty per cent. Then the tally reached ten million, with sixty-seven per cent for Ahmadinejad. And then the most sinister news of all: the public had been told that if anyone approached the Interior Ministry, which would be the obvious site for a protest of the vote count, the police had orders to shoot.
There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much.Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind. Historically, low turnout has always favored conservatives in Iranian elections, while high turnout favors reformers. That’s because Iran’s most reliable voters are those who believe in the system; those who are critical tend to be reluctant to participate. For this reason, in the last three elections, sixty-five per cent of voters have come from traditional, rural villages, which house just thirty-five per cent of the populace. If the current figures are to be believed, urban Iranians who voted for the reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami in 1997 and 2001 have defected to Ahmadinejad in droves. more...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura-secor-irans-stolen-election.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
