WE ARE HERE, AND WE CAN SEE YOU
DON’T GIVE UP YOUR FIGHT!
As many of you know, I’ve been burning for the country, culture and language of Iran for a long time now. It hurts me and thrills me to see what’s happening there now, so I’ decided to tell you all about it as briefly (but still detailed) as possible:
What?
As most of you know, there was an election for the new president of Iran, Friday 12 June. The election was mainly between two people: Ahmadinejad, the president who has had the title for the last four years, and Mousavi who is a former president from the 80s.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has tightened up on the laws to fit better to Islam the past four years. Women have lost many of their rights, and even after a lot of international pressure, children are still being executed. Iran was a great country earlier and had taken a lot after the Western world. After Ahmadinejad got the power, he has done all that was in his power to do to remove the Western influence of his people. Ahmadinejad was also the one who started the atomic project in Iran that has upset the USA gravely and made the relationship between the two states even colder than it already was.
The liberalist Mousavi is Ahmadinejad’s opposition and is fronting a reform. Among some of his goals is to make private television channels legal (right now all channels are state owned), and also give the people of Iran more freedom of speech to discuss politics and demonstrate peacefully when they wish to do so. Mousavi has especially won the hearts of the young people of Iran.
The Results
Both Mousavi and Ahmadinejad self declared themselves as winners Friday night, but most people in Iran and the rest of the world believed that they were ready for a revolution and that Mousavi would win because of this. It came as a big surprise to almost everyone when the official numbers were declared on Saturday: Ahmadinejad had gotten 63 % of the votes, and Mousavi was left with only 33 %!
The People’s Reactions
It didn’t go long at all before people started showing in the streets of Iran, demonstrating against the results, shouting out “Where are our votes?”, “Ahmadinejad is not our president!” and similar things.
It began as a peaceful demonstration where people showed their dissatisfaction about the election results. They had all expected differently. Some chose to wear masks to cover their identity all from the beginning, and many more would do so as the demonstrations continued. It didn’t take long before riot police was put out in the streets to stop the demonstrations, and I can assure you they weren’t gentle to the demonstrators:
The police has been chasing into the demonstrating crowds on their motorbikes, beating whoever comes in their way with their police bats. They also used teargas against the demonstrators and during at the end of Saturday, 170 people (at least 100 reformist politicians) were arrested. The police also did everything to keep the journalists with their cameras off the streets by confiscating the cameras, arresting the journalists on a temporary basis or beating them as well as the rest of the crowd.
Ahmadinejad’s supporters, on the other hand, were celebrating his victory, and 10 000 Iranians listened to his first speech of his new period as president. He compared the riots of Mousavi’s supporters with a football match and said that Mousavi’s team lost, and of course they were upset about it. He has also mentioned that the caught demonstrators would get fees because they broke the traffic rules. As foreseen by most, though, the situation would get much worse than that.
After some terrible demonstrations and a lot of wounded people on Sunday, there was planned a big demonstration in the streets of Tehran on Monday. As this was something Ahmadinejad did not wish, he made the demonstration illegal even before it started, and this put demonstrators back for a little while. Though in the afternoon, the streets of Tehran were more crowded than ever, when close to two million people showed up to support Mousavi, and the leader of the opposition also showed up for the first time after the election, on the roof top of a car in the middle of the crowd, to speak to all his supporters (on the pictures below).
As the demonstration was illegal, police were nearby ready to strike at the gathering crowd. The police went to far worse methods than tear spray, like they had did earlier. Monday, the police started using their guns. At least seven persons are reported shot and dead, and several are severely hurt.
Despite the violent setback from the police yesterday, there are still many people standing and there are planned new demonstrations today.
Mousavi’s reaction
As I’ve already mentioned, Mousavi didn’t show himself in public after the election, before Monday, three days later. But even though he didn’t come out to his people, media told stories about that he was doing things. He filed a complaint about the results, and had a meeting on Sunday with the most powerful man in Iran, the leader of the Guardian Council, and the country’s highest spritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, who at first had congratulated Ahmadinejad with his victory and accepted the election as fair, seems to have withdrawn that conclusion now.
On Monday Mousavi finally showed himself to his two million supporters in the streets of Iran, as I told you earlier. He told them to keep on demonstrating peacefully and he also wants them to wear green, the colour he used during the election campaign.
International reaction
Internationally, it was expected that Mousavi would win and everyone were shocked when he didn’t. The Muslim countries around Iran congratulated Ahmadinejad with the victory as soon as the results were out, but the Western world hung back on doing such a thing. The Minister of Foreign Policies in the USA said that the results weren’t trustworthy all from the beginning, and other European countries have followed after that.
Fraud or not?
More and more proofs of cheating are found, but they can all be set back by a logical explanation.
The first thing people started doubting, was the extremely short time it took the representatives to count the votes. Only a few hours after the election sites were closed, all the 40 million votes were counted by hand with the clear victory of Ahmadinejad. Some experienced people say it’s fully possible to count al the votes this quickly, though, so this alone wouldn’t be enough.
Other than that you have the shocking, high percentage of Ahmadinejad. It wasn’t expected that any of the candidates would get above 50 percent of the votes, which is required for someone to be elected president. Even though this may be true, many people in Iran do not speak English and do not use the Internet, which means they wouldn’t reach out to the rest of the world and tell them who they would vote for. Many of the people who do not speak English are very conservative and may be expected to vote for Ahmadinejad.
At last, there was found something strange from the counting of the votes:
These are two screen shots from the Iranian television during the counting of the votes. The one to the left says that the candidate Razaee had 633 048 votes at 09:47, and the left shows that his number sunk to 587 913 after four hours. That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?
You can read more about the signs of fraud here.
What now?
Today, Tuesday, the Guardian Council have decided to recount all the disputed votes, but until then the demonstrators will not stop demonstrating and showing their dissatisfaction with the results.
Why should you care?
In a globalised world like ours, this may have an impact on much more than we expect. The nuclear project of Iran will go on, and the wish to eliminate Israel will not wither in Ahmadinejad’s and many other religious powers in Iran’s heads. The execution of children will go on like it has done for a long time, the stoning of raped women will not stop.
Freedom of Speech is something the Iranian people now is slowly losing. The demonstrations they’re holding have become forbidden and the internet is slowly closing down. Instant Messaging Clients like MSN are closed down, and most of the web is inaccessible as well.
