Anarchy in the Iran

[Sirotnikov]

And this young generation of Iranians are either too apathetic to change anything (unlike their parents), or they are too cowardly or just comfortably middle class to fight, unlike say the Kurds. So they "riot" every once in a while (you see worse riots at soccer games in Europe), but they're all dreaming of moving to the west and making lots of money.

That is so pretentious, coming from someone living in one of the world's free countries.

While some people go on crying about their constitutional right to be an idiot being infringed in the good ol' USA, there's an entire generation of people that has to live in an actual repressive regime that uses the bulk of it's security forces for domestic espionage, repression, and has unlimited powers.

People constantly post here to remind us how they freely get drunk, get high and get putang. Iranian youth have their basic human rights squatted by a repressive totalitarian regime that prevents them from doing any of the things you take for granted. When they get drunk, or get laid, or even sometimes hold hands in public, they risk far more than you ever did in any political riot. And you know what? They still resist, and fight the police, and go underground and fight for themselves, including in these elections. Is that your idea of comfortable middle class?

Do you know how many casualties there are in the last couple of days? When was the last time you put your life on the line? Still wanna call them cowards?

A short blog report from a sky news correspondent in Tehran

[Sirotnikov]

Reading this again, I over reacted.

But I still think it's pretentious to call the people there cowards or imply they are "comfortably middle class" slackers, only interested in quick riches. Walk a mile in their shoes first. The mere fact they're not all fleeing, but staying put and voting means they struggle for their country.

[DanS]

I still don't know whether the election was rigged. It seems likely, but it also seems entirely possible that the countryside could have a different view of Ahmadinejad than the cities.

[DinoDoc]

I still don't know whether the election was rigged. It seems likely, but it also seems entirely possible that the countryside could have a different view of Ahmadinejad than the cities.

According to the official results, Ahmadinejad won 80 percent of the vote in Mousavi’s home town and former parliamentary Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, another candidate, got a “miniscule” proportion of votes in Lorestan, from where he comes, Ehteshami said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=a9ASjITl62I0

That seems wierd to me if the results are legit.

[Kitschum]

When they get drunk, or get laid, or even sometimes hold hands in public, they risk far more than you ever did in any political riot. And you know what? They still resist, and fight the police, and go underground and fight for themselves, including in these elections. Is that your idea of comfortable middle class?

No, they don't resist for the most part. They hardly fight at all. They are humiliated daily by the rednecks of the Basij, and they just clench their fists thinking of their future. Why have there been no strikes? Why do they vote in a rigged system? Why do they pin their hopes on failed ex-revolutionaries like Mousavi?

They are clearly frustrated, but they are also way, way too afraid of the NAJA (police) to do more than scream slogans and break a few windows. They are just venting a little before they have to get back to work or uni. The reason is most of them don't want to jeopardize their dreams of life in Los Angeles, Toronto, London or Berlin. If they haven't left already it's because they haven't yet had the chance.

Btw, youth in Iran drink alcohol, do drugs, flirt, dance and have sex. Perhaps not in the street, but not exactly in secret either.

Do you know how many casualties there are in the last couple of days? When was the last time you put your life on the line? Still wanna call them cowards?

Yes, the police beat up people. No different from police anywhere. Do the demonstrators risk their lives? I don't think so. I don't wish for there to be any deaths, but as far as I know there hasn't been any confirmed yet anyway.

I know I was being provocative. I'm frustrated too. I want Mousavi to be different from Khatami, but he is more of the same. The protests seem to have calmed for now with many opposition leaders apparently arrested. We'll see what happens, but I think it will blow over very quickly. Commentators in the West (I'm aware that I'm in the west too thanks ) always seems to be jumping the gun on Iran.

[Traianvs]

The riots continue. It seems several opposition politicians have been arrested, as well as foreign journalists apparently. A few Belgians were kept in custody for a while, but were released under the condition they would no longer take any pictures.

Hmm.

[Dinner]

From a blog:

Informed Comment: Stealing the Iranian Election: 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.

Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud.... But... this... looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime. As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei... who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts. This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election. This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.... The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation. My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit....

I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be.

PS: Here's the data.... Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli: "Of 39,165,191 votes counted (85 percent), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 24,527,516 (62.63 percent)." He announced that Mir-Hossein Mousavi came in second with 13,216,411 votes (33.75 percent). Mohsen Rezaei got 678,240 votes (1.73 percent). Mehdi Karroubi with 333,635 votes (0.85 percent). He put the void ballots at 409,389 (1.04 percent).

[SlowwHand]

Maybe counters suffer from Floridaitis.

[Dis]

am I really the only one who thinks Ahmadinejad isn't that bad? Compared to NK's dictator, he's a saint.

[SlowwHand]

You're getting a little carried away.

[trev]

Fraud seems very likely, very unlikely the government will be destabilized by it, but the start of cracks in Iranian society is probably a good thing in the long term.

[Sirotnikov]

i hope it will cause large cracks.

they had huge hope for a change in leading spirit

[Heraclitus]

am I really the only one who thinks Ahmadinejad isn't that bad? Compared to NK's dictator, he's a saint.

Him tampering with the elections puts him firmly in pseudofascist territory and I think his persoanl fantasies probably include remaking the Persian empire.

[BeBMan]

Shots have been fired at a rally in Iran where hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating against the result of last week's election.

Defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had addressed the crowd earlier in his first public appearance since Friday's vote.

He believes results were rigged to allow President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to win a landslide victory.

Mr Ahmadinejad has dismissed the claims and says the vote was fair.

The BBC's Jon Leyne, in Tehran, says Monday's rally was the biggest demonstration in the Islamic republic's 30-year history and described it as a "political earthquake".

The demonstrators gathered in Tehran's Revolution Square, chanting pro-Mousavi slogans as riot police stood by.

Tehran map

"Mousavi we support you. We will die, but retrieve our votes," they shouted, many wearing the green of Mousavi's election campaign.

And Mr Mousavi eventually appeared, addressing the crowd from the roof of his car.

"The vote of the people is more important than Mousavi or any other person," he told his supporters.

His wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a high-profile supporter of her husband's campaign, later said they would keep up their protests. "We will stand until the end," she told the AFP.

Before Mr Mousavi arrived, Reuters reported that his supporters had scuffled with stick-wielding men on motorcycles - apparently supporters of the president.

Following two days of unrest, the interior ministry warned earlier on Monday that "any disrupter of public security would be dealt with according to the law".

'Unacceptable' force

The renewed protests come after Mr Mousavi and fellow defeated candidate Mohsen Rezai filed official complaints against the election result with the Guardian Council - the country's powerful clerical group.

POST-POLL CRACKDOWN
More than 100 opposition figures arrested, including the brother of ex-reformist President Khatami.
Local and international phone and text message services interrupted
Social networking and newspaper websites blocked
BBC says "heavy electronic jamming" from inside Iran disrupts its Persian TV service
International journalists arrested and asked to leave
Iranian newspapers do not carry reports of the violence
Source: Various reports

Editors' blog: Stop the jamming
Guide: How Iran is ruled
Internet brings events to life
Challenge to republic

State television reported that supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has upheld the election result, urged the Guardian Council to "precisely consider" the complaints.

A spokesman for the 12-member council said they would meet Mr Mousavi and Mr Rezai on Tuesday. They are expected to decide on the complaints by next week.

Dozens of opposition activists have been arrested since the protests began, while internet sites appear to have been blocked and the media heavily restricted. A number of countries have expressed concern at the conduct of the election and the subsequent clampdown.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was following the situation closely. "The position of me and the United Nations is that the genuine will of the Iranian people should be fully respected," he told reporters.

EU foreign ministers expressed "serious concern" and called for an inquiry into the conduct of the election.

Ahmadinejad supporters demonstrate outside the British embassy in Tehran on 15/6/09
Ahmadinejad supporters protested at French and UK embassies in Tehran

France and Germany have summoned their Iranian ambassadors to explain what happened.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised the use of "completely unacceptable" force against protesters.

"We are worried about the limitations of media coverage and we believe there should be a transparent evaluation of the election result. There are signs of irregularities," she said.

Groups of Ahmadinejad supporters gathered outside French and British embassies in Tehran, protesting against what they consider to be foreign interference in Iran's affairs.

"We have gathered here to protest the hidden interference of the Brits and the world, who are trying to create chaos in our country," one protester said.

Among the countries congratulating Mr Ahmadinejad on his victory were Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and North Korea.

Bolding by me of course.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8101098.stm

[Japher]

Defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had addressed the crowd earlier in his first public appearance since Friday's vote.

He believes results were rigged to allow President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to win a landslide victory.

Mr Ahmadinejad has dismissed the claims and says the vote was fair.

Well, Mr Ahmadeitjihad says it's good, why would he lie?