Originally published on Shahrvand English (N° 34) – June 21, 2005
In the past few weeks in this series, Binesh Hassanpour and Samira Mohyeddin a few of our regular writers have attempted to open up dialogue as well as provide critical analyses of the issues surrounding Iran’s June 17 Presidential Election. In this issue two new voices wage in the debate. In the aftermath of the first round of the election with the prospect of the second round of elections and the face off between Rafsanjani and Ahmadinezhad, the twiddle-dee and twiddle- dum of the Islamic far right, the elimination of all female candidates, rumours of elections fraud, the intensification of a call to boycott the election by notable political prisoners and students groups in Iran, and the closures of more newspapers, it becomes even more absurd to speak about democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In the diaspora Iranian ex-patriots reigned in the election with protests in numerous major cities throughout the world. In Canada, these protests included a rally calling for the boycott of the Iranian elections and the release of all political prisoners in Toronto’s Queeen’s Park on Friday June 17 as well as a demonstration outside of the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa where red paint symbolizing blood was splattered on the walls of the building. As this introduction is being written reports have come in from Iran that writer Naser Zarafshan, one of the many political prisoners languishing in Iranian jails is on the verge of death due to his ongoing hunger strike. The report comes at the same time as a news item announcing that Massouma al-Mubarak was sworn-in as the first woman cabinet minister in Kuwait. Clearly, we have a long way to go before the words election and democracy can be spoken about Iran without irony.
“There has been bizarre interference. Money has changed hands.”
Mehdi Karroubi, June 17, 2005.
This past Friday, 17 of June 2005, marked a historic day for the Islamic Republic of Iran. The country’s presidential elections ended with shocking results, so shocking in fact that the very candidate who came in second was surprised by the result. Moreover, since no one candidate was able to garner the 50 percent plus votes required to win outright, for the first time in its history the election was extended to a two-man runoff, dated for next Friday, June 24.
In the early going the surprise was the quick lead that Mehdi Karroubi, the head of the Majlis and the cleric-reformist candidate took. However, as the night wound its way through the two extensions of the poll closing times, Hashemi Rafsanjani slowly made
his way up the votes. When the dust settled, everyone was in for a shock. Not only had Rafsanjani not manage to get anywhere near the required half of the votes, but he had barely managed to edge out the runner-up, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative hardliner Tehran mayor, who is the favoured choice and the right-hand man of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Spiritual Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. A man who’s firm and fanatic belief in the Islamic tenets of the government is rivalled by few. A former leader of the Revolutionary Guard, whose ideology towards the Islamic Revolution is best summarized by himself: “We did not have a revolution in order to have democracy.” I think it would be fair to say that no one foresaw this result.
But come, let’s think about this, from a wider point of view. As many political prognosticators are already predicting, the most likely outcome next week will be a large mobilization of voters in favour of Rafsanjani. Many predict that many of those who either boycotted the vote, or had supported Mr. Moein will shift to the Rafsanjani camp, since his pragmatism will offer the greatest consolation in the face of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s alternative.
One must always remember that politics is an arena of relatives. It is not a question of which candidates is the best on an absolute level, it only matters that one candidate is that much better than the other. Take the case of the last American elections. Do we, non-Bush supporters, really believe that John Kerry was that good of a Democrat? If we were to critically analyze what Kerry offered, in comparison to past ‘democrats’ he would have no doubt, come out as one of the more conservative, or rather Republican of the bunch. However, when forced with the choice, one generally chooses the lesser of two evils. That, nonetheless, does not take away the fact that you’re still picking evil.
Going back to the Iranian dilemma, the possible, and likely, support for Mr. Rafsanjani, will, in turn, warp the appearance of the final results. Since, should such a thing happen, Mr. Rafsanjani would take the Presidency with a significant margin and a large portion of the vote. They could then showcase their ‘democratic election’ to all critics, and justify the President’s actions by saying that if the people didn’t want him, they wouldn’t have supported him with such an overwhelming majority.
In the unlikely – and truly nightmarish – scenario of Ahmadinejad actually pulling off the victory, the hardliners within the government, will still be winners, as they’ll have a president who believes that it is against the Islamic spirit for a man to wear a short-sleeved shirt, let alone, all the other freedoms which have appeared during the last seven ‘reformative’ years. I do not doubt that, in such a scenario, the first group to be attacked would be the women, followed by dissenters, and all who opposed the hard-line viewpoint. This is a character, after all, whose activities in the Revolutionary Guard were directly related to the suppression of dissidents in Iran, and terrorist attacks abroad.
Regardless of the outcome, one of the biggest winners in this whole charade will be Mr. Khamenei. He took the step to make a gesture of ‘good faith’ towards ‘democracy’ in overturning the Guardian Council’s decision to disqualify the only ‘true’ reform candidate: Mr. Moein. Now, in light of Mr. Moein’s fifth place finish this move looks much more ingenious and effective. All he needs to give to any critic is a simple shrug of a shoulder, “Hey, I even allowed him to run, but only 13 percent of the vote went to him. The people just didn’t agree with his ideology”. Indeed, they preferred Mr. Ahmadinejad’s purist Islamic stance.
Now, as to the question of how such a thing could have happened, there aren’t many depths we can come up with, below which this government would not stoop to in order to extend their tenure at the top. I doubt that in the 80’s, or even the early 90’s, we would have seen such outrage as displayed by the cleric Karroubi, on Friday after finding out the final tally of votes. He spoke of result tampering, money exchange between insider parties, and there were claims that the police and the revolutionary guard threatened the people to take the Ahmadinejad ticket. There were also rumours of votes being registered under birth certificates of deceased people.
The thought of such actions are not that far-fetched considering the surprise shown, not just by the likes of Karroubi and the people, but rather by Ahmadinejad himself. He and his campaign team were so surprised by an un-expecting final result that they hadn’t even prepared a podium for him to give his victory speech at.
Speculation is that most of the pro-Ahmadinejad votes were by voters from religiously devout poor of the suburbs of Tehran and similar areas. Apparently some weeks before, several local mullahs had been instructed by a higher ranking cleric to tell their followers that their ideal choice would be Ahmadinejad.
The Interior Ministry placed voter participation at 63 percent of the 47 million registered voters. That was hailed, naturally, as a triumph by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who had called for a high turnout in order to render baseless the criticism from the United States.
Perhaps, what we need to understand is that although the greatest noise is made by the ‘intellectuals’, the educated, the ideologues and the dissidents, a significant portion of the population are the pious poor, the rural dwellers and farmers, and the uneducated, for whom Islam is an integral part of life, for whom the word of the local Mullah is the word to live by and act by. Perhaps, this is the Iranian majority.
