Roger Cohen: Iran’s Day of Anguish

[babylonsister]

Iran’s Day of Anguish

By ROGER COHEN
Published: June 14, 2009


TEHRAN — She was in tears like many women on the streets of Iran’s battered capital. “Throw away your pen and paper and come to our aid,” she said, pointing to my notebook. “There is no freedom here.”

And she was gone, away through the milling crowds near the locked-down Interior Ministry spewing its pick-ups full of black-clad riot police. The “green wave” of Iran’s pre-election euphoria had turned black.

Down the street outside the ghostly campaign headquarters of the defeated reformist candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the baton-wielding police came in whining phalanxes, two to a motorbike, scattering people, beating them.

“Disperse or we’ll do other things and then you’ll really know.” The voice, from a police megaphone, was steady in its menace. “You, over there, in a white hat, I’m talking to you.”

Anger hung in the air, a sullen pall enveloping the city, denser than its smog, bitter as smashed hope.

I say “defeated.” But everything I have seen suggests Moussavi, now rumored to be under house arrest, was cheated, the Iranian people defrauded, in what Moussavi called an act of official “wizardry.”

Within two hours of the closing of the polls, contrary to prior practice and electoral rules, the Interior Ministry, through the state news agency, announced a landslide victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose fantastical take on the world and world history appears to have added another fantastical episode.

Throughout the country, across regions of vast social and ethnic disparity, including Azeri areas that had indicated strong support for Moussavi (himself an Azeri), Ahmadinejad’s margin scarcely wavered, ending at an official 62.63 percent. That’s 24.5 million votes, a breathtaking 8 million more than he got four years ago.

No tally I’ve encountered of Ahmadinejad’s bedrock support among the rural and urban poor, religious conservatives and revolutionary ideologues gets within 6 million votes of that number.

Ahmadinejad won in other candidates’ hometowns, including Moussavi’s. He won in every major city except Tehran. He won very big, against the backdrop of an economic slump.

He won as the Interior Ministry was sealed, opposition Web sites were shut down, text messages were cut off, cell phones were interrupted, Internet access was impeded, dozens of opposition figures were arrested, universities were closed and a massive show of force was orchestrated to ram home the result to an incredulous public.

Overnight, a whole movement and mood were vaporized, to the point that they appeared a hallucination.

The crowds called it a “coup d’état.” They shouted “Marg Bar Dictator” — “Death to the dictator.” Eyes smoldered.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/opinion/15iht-edcohen.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[Tutankhamun]

1. American style theocratic "democracy" (circa 2000-2004) comes to Iran.