Post-Election Protests In Iran

Well, the much-anticipated elections in Iran have taken place with President Ahmadinejad declaring victory and his opponent (and his supporters), Mir-Hossein Moussavi, claiming the election was a fraud. Unfortunately, the incredibly promising (and peaceful) anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrations and rallies leading up to the election, were replaced today with violent reactions to the election results. While any freedom-loving, pro-democracy person can understand the frustration of Moussavi’s supporters, it is highly likely that the violence in the streets of Tehran will ultimately lead to a overly heavy-handed state-sponsored crack-down on the demonstrators.

During a press conference today (see this post for more on the press conference), Secretary of State Clinton expressed her hope that the election results truly reflected the will of the people and that the administration was closely monitoring the situation in Iran. I’m sure there will be more from the Secretary and the State Department in the coming days, depending on how all this plays out.

Professor Juan Cole, writing over at Salon, outlines the main problem with the election results:

A few thousand Iranian young people demonstrated in Iran on Saturday morning to protest the announcement by that country’s Interior Ministry that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won a second term by an overwhelming margin of 63 percent. The president’s rivals decried ballot fraud and many observers saw the results as a hard-liner coup. If the government really has descended to the level of fixing the presidential elections, it is a sign of deep insecurity and fear of change, as Tehran is challenged by the Obama administration’s outreach and by reformist stirrings among youth and women.

Obama administration officials were privately casting doubt on the announced vote tallies. They pointed out that it was unlikely that Ahmadinejad had defeated his chief opponent, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, by a margin of 57 percent, in Moussavi’s own home city of Tabriz. Nor is it plausible, as claimed, that Ahmadinejad won a majority of votes in the capital, Tehran, from which he hails. The final tally also gave only 320,000 votes to the other reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, who had helped force Ahmadinejad into a runoff election when he ran in 2005. It seems odd that he get less than 1 percent of the votes in this round. Karoubi, an ethnic Lur from Iran’s west, was even alleged to have done poorly in those provinces.

The final vote counts alleged for cities and provinces, even more so than the landslide claimed by the incumbent nationally, strongly suggest a last-minute and clumsy fraud. A carefully planned theft of the election would at least have conceded Tabriz to Moussavi and the rural western Iranian villages to Karoubi. [emphasis mine]

Professor Cole then goes into more detail over at his website, Informed Comment. Here is an excerpt from his post but definitely follow the link to his site and read the whole thing:

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen:

—It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

—Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers.

—It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran’s western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

…

The question is, given the dictatorial tendencies of President Ahmadinejad, what realistic options do the Iranian people have if it turns out the election really was stolen?

UPDATE: Check out this piece over at HuffPo, which highlights one aspect of the political right’s view on the Iranian election- a view which was conveniently ignored by the mainstream media.

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