Eight days after Iran's disputed presidential election, with a partial recount under way, the stability of the country depends on the authorities' response to opposition protests, writes MARY FITZGERALD, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, in Tehran
THE SOMBRE face of Ayatollah Khomeini gazed down from a framed portrait as dozens of voters formed untidy queues underneath the elevated platform where he used to hold court. Husaniyah Jamaran, a mosque complex in north Tehran from where Khomeini ruled the Islamic Republic, was transformed into a polling station last Friday week for Iran’s 10th presidential election since the 1979 revolution. Among those who turned up to vote at Jamaran was Mohsen Rezaie, one of three challengers to the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and probably the closest to him in ideology.
My translator and I managed to push through the sea of burly minders and well-wishers swirling around Rezaie, once a commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, to ask him about the rumours of turnout so high as to be unprecedented. Rezaie, a bespectacled man with a stern demeanour, nodded and said he was delighted to hear that so many were voting. “The people’s decision is what matters . . . We should rely on the people’s judgment.”
What Rezaie and those who filled the stuffy chamber at Jamaran were not expecting was the sequence of events that would follow the closure of the last polling booth that night. Within hours Ahmadinejad was declared the victor, with the widest margin ever recorded in an Iranian presidential election. Supporters of the opposition candidates, especially those of Mir Hussein Mousavi, considered Ahmadinejad’s strongest challenger, were aghast. But their surprise soon gave way to anger amid suspicions the election had been stolen. They took to the streets, and within days their clamour for a rerun of the poll had turned into the most serious crisis the Islamic Republic has faced since its inception.
The turmoil, which has resulted in the deaths of at least seven people shot by pro-government militias, shows little sign of abating. Today Mousavi, Rezaie and third challenger Mehdi Karroubi, will air their allegations of widespread vote rigging at a meeting with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as demonstrators continue to defy the authorities on the eighth consecutive day of protests that have spread beyond Tehran to several other cities around the country.
EVEN BEFORE THEelection, many expected some measure of fraud. Several people told me they brought their own pens to polling stations, having heard rumours that official pens contained ink that dried to leave no trace. As the partial recount continues, there is as yet no proof that Ahmadinejad's re-election was manipulated, but there is plenty to fuel the conspiracy theories.
Around half of the 39 million votes cast were counted, by hand, within three hours of polling booths shutting, according to officials.
Impossible, say the defeated candidates and their supporters. Official results show that Mousavi, an Azeri, beat Ahmadinejad by a whisper in West Azerbaijan province and lost in East Azerbaijan, his home province. Massive turnouts like last Friday’s 85 per cent usually tend to favour candidates who, like Mousavi and Karroubi, have courted the moderate and reformist vote, and have managed to persuade those normally reluctant or too jaded to vote.
The three losing candidates have presented a list of complaints that range from shortages of ballot papers in opposition strongholds; vote buying; the exclusion of their representatives from polling stations and counts; and the fact electoral committees were dominated with Ahmadinejad supporters. Mousavi’s team allege the number of votes counted exceeded that of eligible voters in 70 wards, and that many polling stations shut while people were still lined up outside.
Moreover, the 24.5 million votes supposedly cast for Ahmadinejad would make him the most popular elected representative in the annals of the Islamic Republic, despite the considerable deepening of the anyone-but-Ahmadinejad sentiment in the weeks leading up to the election. My own conversations with a wide range of Iranians in three cities, from the powerful men who run Tehran’s main bazaar to fruit sellers across the city, from taxi drivers to students from lower middle class families, from women in chadors to caretakers at mosques, showed that opposition to Ahmadinejad was not just confined to the chattering classes of north Tehran’s affluent enclaves.
The gripes against the man who emerged from relative obscurity to become president in 2005 range from his crude populist style and strident tone on domestic and international issues to his massaging of statistics and his tightening of social restrictions, but most of all they focus on his disastrous management of Iran’s limping economy.
The story of Hussein, the taxi driver I hired for the duration of my stay in Tehran, is instructive. From western Iran, he spent some time in Britain before fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. He has been struggling to provide for his family since then. Four years ago, Hussein voted for Ahmadinejad because he promised something new.
He was sceptical of the giddy street campaigning that came to epitomise Mousavi’s more youthful supporters. “How many of these are actually interested in the election, and how many are the sons of rich men who just want to let off steam,” he wondered aloud, as we sat in gridlocked traffic while hundreds of exuberant young Tehranis, decked in the signature green of Mousavi’s campaign, danced and even rollerbladed between the cars, singing “Ahmadi bye bye” in the last hours of campaigning before election day.
Hussein’s main concern was his children and their future. He spoke of how difficult life had become for those under 30 – who make up more than two-thirds of the population – particularly those who are not cushioned by privilege. Blighted by unemployment and bleak prospects, they cannot afford to marry, and lead increasingly frustrated lives in cramped family homes. Hussein mulled over his vote until the last minute. “I will go for the person who will be best for my children’s future,” he told me. The day of the election he said he had voted for Mousavi but expected Ahmadinejad to win. “Remember Iran is not just Tehran, and Ahmadinejad has travelled to every province in the country handing out money and promising the people everything,” Hussein said. “He is very popular in the countryside.”
Most Iranians anticipated a tight race between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, and some opposition supporters concede that it is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad would have won anyway, but narrowly, perhaps with less than 50 per cent of the vote, prompting a run-off he might have lost if the other candidates joined forces against him. They never expected what transpired last weekend.
“Do they take us as fools?” asks an indignant Fatemeh in Esfahan, one of the biggest cities outside Tehran. A twentysomething graduate, Fatemeh voted for Mousavi, as did all her friends and family. She was one of thousands who protested on Esfahan’s historic avenues this week. “I ran away when the police started using gas against us, and I saw them beating others with batons and sticks,” she says. “I was shocked at how they responded. My anger is not just about the fact my candidate lost. It is more to do with this blatant cheating that they seem to think they can get away with. We feel insulted.”
Ali Reza and his wife Yasmin, both in their mid-twenties, were equally incensed as they queued for a kebab sandwich at the Bobby Sands fast food stand in north Tehran where the hunger striker’s face adorns the menu. A street adjoining the British embassy further south also carries Sands’s name. Ali Reza’s shop on Vali Asr, the main artery that traverses Tehran from north to south, has been closed since last weekend as demonstrators converged on Vali Asr and surrounding streets, often clashing with police and the pro-government volunteer milita known as the Basij. “Everyone we know voted for Mousavi and no one believes this result,” he says. “Ahmadinejad is a zero.”
Those who counter that “Ahmadinejad is love” – one of the flowery slogans used by his supporters in rallies this week – are a far more diverse group than often portrayed. While Ahmadinejad’s campaign posters, featuring the self-styled man of the people praying, dining with a family in rural Iran, or comforting an elderly man, seem designed to appeal to the pious, the poor, and the downtrodden, his constituency is wider than that. At pro-Ahmadinejad gatherings – including his victory rally in Tehran last Sunday – there were many bearded men and women in traditional black chadors, but I also met people such as Sara Ahmed, a dentistry student whose heavy make-up, sequinned tunic and dyed hair covered with a plaid headscarf made her look more like the stereotypical Mousavi supporter I had heard more conservative Iranians grumble about. “Take a look at the number of people here today,” she said. “We are all here to show our president we are with him. Ahmadinejad has done a lot for the poor but they are not the only people who support him.”
Some families were divided between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. At Behesht-e-Zahra, the sprawling cemetery next to the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini on the outskirts of Tehran, an intense young man with a heavy beard discussed the candidates as he showed me where tens of thousands of those who died in the war with Iraq are buried. He voted for Ahmadinejad, he said, because the president “understands the way of the Koran, the way of Imam Khomeini and the way of the martyrs”. Ahmadinejad had also lavished attention on war veterans and the families of those who had died fighting. Mousavi wanted to implement only “the policies of the West” in Iran, he said, adding that his brother-in-law – a man he described as “not a good Muslim” – voted for Mousavi.
BUT WHATEVER WAYallegiances played out before the election, there are signs of a growing unease that extends beyond the people who are taking to the streets to claim victory was snatched from Mousavi. In many respects, this has become bigger than the competition between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.
“It is shocking that the government would cheat as much as this,” one chador-clad young woman confided in a low voice as she waited to board a flight to her hometown of Shiraz at Tehran airport. “I cannot believe it. It goes against everything we believe in.”
This crisis, with protests that cut across generations and economic strata, is markedly different to the student uprisings so brutally suppressed by the Iranian authorities in 1999 and 2003. The convulsions of this week were inspired by widely shared rage over a disputed national election, and the possibility that the regime could attempt such an audacious fraud and defend it with violence has dismayed a broad swathe of the population beyond the usual critics of the system.
“The power of the people is stronger than the violence of the regime,” says Ibrahim, a fruit seller on one of north Tehran’s busiest squares. “The regime is playing with fire.”
All of this must be weighing on the mind of Ayatollah Khamenei as he contemplates his next step. As Iran's supreme leader (he took over from Khomeini in 1989), the septuagenarian wields power through velayat-e faqih, a system of jurisprudence instituted by Khomeini that gives control to the clerics. The presidency, parliament, judiciary, military, the Revolutionary Guards, police, and intelligence services are all ultimately under Khamenei's thumb.
During the pre-election campaign, Ahmadinejad appeared to have the tacit backing of Ayatollah Khamenei. At one stage, the supreme leader urged voters to elect “those who live a simple and modest life, who are acquainted with the problems and sufferings of other people and who have avoided extravagance” – a description that chimed with Ahmadinejad’s vision of himself as a champion of the impoverished and the marginalised.
Soon after the contested results were announced last weekend, Khamenei issued a statement welcoming Ahmadinejad’s re-election as a “divine intervention”. He also described the poll as a fair one. Since then he has announced a partial recount of the votes, interpreted by some as a concession aimed at quelling the growing discontent.
THE QUESTION NOW IS HOW LONG THEregime will tolerate the demonstrations, and how long the protesters will remain on the streets. Mousavi, the unlikely hero who has become a figurehead for much more than he could ever have imagined, remains defiant. Some fear the possibility of a Tiananmen Square scenario. What machinations are taking place behind closed doors in one of the most opaque governments in the world remains to be seen. Many are waiting for the next move by Mousavi ally Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful cleric and former president whose animus towards Ahmadinejad is well known. Rafsanjani heads the Assembly of Experts, a body of clerics that under the Iranian constitution has the power to dismiss the supreme leader.
Juan Cole, an American academic and Iran specialist, argued on his blog that the huge demonstrations this week contain ominous echoes of the revolution that brought the Islamic Republic into being exactly three decades ago.
“The repertoires of protest the reformists are using echo those of the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution – they are chanting ‘God is Great’, mourning pious fallen martyrs, etc – another sign that this movement is not just alienated secularised elites,” Cole wrote.
“In 1978, such demonstrations for those killed in previous demonstrations grew in size all through the year, till they reached an alleged million in the streets of Tehran. Since the reformists are already claiming Monday’s rally was a million, you wonder where things will go from here.”