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Poll Results Prompt Iran Protests
TEHRAN - Thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets of Tehran in protest against the outcome of the country's elections, in the biggest unrest since the 1979 revolution.
Riot police were deployed in the capital on Saturday after about 3,000 supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, a reformist candidate, took to the streets following the announcement of his defeat by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent president.
The protests intensified following a televised speech by Ahmadinejad in which he said the vote had been "completely free" and the outcome was "a great victory" for Iran.
"Today, the people of Iran have inspired other nations and disappointed their ill-wishers," he said.
"This is a great victory at a time when the ... propaganda facilities outside Iran and sometimes inside Iran were totally mobilised against our people."
Ahmadinejad praised the country's youth, but made no direct mention of the protests.
'Running battles'
Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili, reporting from Tehran, said major streets in the north of the city had come to a standstill.
"Coming up the street there were running battles happening between riot police and students and there were refuse bins alight in the middle of the road," he said.
"I saw riot police hitting students with sticks. I saw students - or young people - throwing stones at the riot police, trying to knock them off their motorcycles.
"But you didn't get a sense that there was any kind of organised movement in this."
Mohsen Khancharli, Tehran's deputy police chief, warned that his officers would "strongly confront" any gathering or rally held without permission.
"Police are not confronting people but only those who are disturbing public order or who make damage to public places," he told Iran's official IRNA news agency.
Fearing the protests might spread, authorities blocked access to some news websites and Facebook, the social networking site.
"Text messaging has been closed all day and now its very difficult to even get a mobile telephone line," our correspondent said.
Poll victory
Ahmadinejad was declared the winner by a wide margin in Friday's election, with figures from the interior ministry showing he had taken 62.63 per cent of the vote, while Mousavi garnered only 33.75 per cent.
The scale of Ahmadinejad's triumph upset widespread expectations that Mousavi might win the race.
But supporters of Ahmadinejad also took to the street following the announcement of his victory, waving Iranian flags and honking car horns in celebration of his winning a second, four-year term.
Mehran Kamrava, the director of the centre for international and regional studies, at Georgetown University's campus in Qatar, said that protests in northern Tehran were not necessarily an indication of a rigged ballot.
"The western media has been talking to people in north Tehran, who tend to vote overwhelmingly against Ahmadinejad," he told Al Jazeera.
"But let's not forget that many of the urban Iranians have priorities and proclivities that are not necessarily reflected in other areas of the main cities, and those people could easily have voted for Ahmadinejad.
"Iranian politics have proved themselves to be notoriously unpredictable and this could be one of those instances of unpredictability."
'Provocative behaviour'
Mousavi said that members of his election headquarters had been beaten "with batons, wooden sticks and electrical rods".
He also appealed directly to Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran's supreme leader, to intervene and stop what he said were violations of the law.
But Khameini appeared unlikely to intervene, calling on defeated candidates and their supporters to avoid "provocative behaviour".
"The chosen and respected president is the president of all the Iranian nation and everyone, including yesterday's competitors, must unanimously support and help him," he said in a statement read on state television.
Iran's elections have seen allegations of vote rigging in the past.
During the 2005 election, when Ahmadinejad won the presidency, there were some allegations of fraud, but the claims were never investigated.
Iran does not allow international election monitors.
10 Comments so far
Show All'during the 2005 election, when bla bla bla won the presidency, there were some allegations of fraud, but the claims were never investigated'.............
mmmmmm, sounds familiar..................where have i heard that before????????????
I am really heartened to see that not all USAans are brain dead and many are skeptical of the current concerted USA Media Propaganda Blitz in cooperation with the USA strategy to destabilize Iran.
RIght? at least here (in this "oppressive" regime) we have some PROMPT rioting!
Not like in the QUAGPIRE.
the mighty xzorloc
SarahConnah
At least Iranian's know when they've been screwed over and are showing their outrage. Where were we in 2000?
Just watching!
So what would you do if your country's election had been stolen? Why?
Inquiring minds want to know. What will you do?
It must be bitter indeed to truly understand that Democracy, just ain't that easy. Far easier to acquire Gucci, Rolex and Ferrari.
Sophie Scholl-The Final Days
I think Iran might still remember Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA overthrow of their democracy for oil in 1953. A few planted stories - a few hired riots...
I called this last week when the CIA supported Baluchistan terrorists in Iran increased their activities --------- Israel agrees not to Nuke Tehran and instead the USA destabilizes Iran ala Kermit Roosevelt.
The USA news reports are almost verbatim of the reports when the USA overthrew Iran's first democratically elected President because he nationalized British and USA oil wells.
Very suspicious that the opposition claimed the election just as the vote count began.
Gee USA policy death,destruction and destabilization across the middle east from Palestine to India.
I hope all USA citizens can appreciate the irony of being labeled an insurgent when resisting the Chinese, after the Chinese festoon your children, spouses and parents with white phosphorous.
The world outside Iran will probably never get to know who truly won the recent presidential elections. It is certainly possible that the results are fraudulent. On the other hand, what was Moussavi's evidence to claim victory so soon after the polling places had closed? It seems to me that his claim was only based on guesswork.
Sophie and her brother Hans, students in the early 1940's at the University in Munich, were hanged for their written opposition to Hitler. But their followers still know how to smell a rat.
Since when did The "New Yorker" become a reputable source of views on Iranian affairs?
and from yesterdays's CD report: Robert Dreyfuss: "... I began my day at the 7th Tir Technical School in central Tehran. It is a relatively prosperous, middle-class area, and scores of people were on line this morning, ID cards in hand, waiting patiently to vote... in Mir Hossein Mousavi country... Tarandeh, 38, a teacher with an M.A. in English," made it clear that he was voting against the outspoken Ahmadinejad..."
"The Islamic Republic and the West are at odds over Tehran's nuclear program and support for militant groups that oppose Israel. Pro-U.S. Arab leaders have decried Iran's rising ambitions."
...big papers kept up the charade ("As Iran Votes, Talk of a Sea Change," went The New York Times), as if willing the fantasy.
"[F]or those who dreamed of a gentler Iran," Keller wrote from Tehran, "Saturday was a day of smoldering anger, crushed hopes and punctured illusions, from the streets of Tehran to the policy centers of Western capitals. Pro-western Iranians who hoped for a bit more freedom, a better managed economy [actually under constant attack by the USA] and a less reviled image in the world wavered between protest and despair on Saturday."
"All I can say is that they, and the amnesiac Western press, did it to themselves. A quarter of Iran's population is under 15, the median age is 26 (which means half the population is 26 or younger), which means the overwhelming majority of voters in Saturday's election have no memory of the 1980s when Mousavi was in charge of a country that was free neither economically nor in any other way. When others spoke of ending the Iran-Iraq war (promoted by the USA) that had ravaged the country, Mousavi wailed, charging quitters that they were abandoning the ideals of the revolution.
So why was the West so self-deluded, both about Mousavi and the outcowme of a foregone conclusion? I wish it was about misplaced hopes. No. It's something less honorable than that. It's about misplaced projections. It's about presuming that the West's agenda for Iran can somehow muscle its way over the agenda Iran reserves for itself. It's about reverting to pre-1979 assumptions that Iran would be as the West would want it to be. Which is to say that 30 years of history have taught the West next to nothing about Iran. That ignorance, those attitudes, those presumptions,(largely from the Western press/propaganda) are precisely why Iranians are still ready to vote for a man like Ahmadinejad, because for all his anti-Semitism, his belligerence, even his apparent stupidity on more than a few matters of state, he is the embodiment of an Iranian identity that brooks no imports, that needs no one else, certainly nothing western, not even (and above all not) Barack Obama, to define it. Mousavi would likely have been no different ideologically, but why chuck off a known quantity?
Reactionary editorial pages (what pages are left, anyway) will fold all over each other to claim that Iranians have embraced hate, that they've endorsed the destruction of Israel, that they've made their hostility clear. Stupid judgments, as I see them, if excusably America-centric: they're meant well. But they miss the history/strong Western motive.
Read more:
http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/06/13/dashing-fabricated-hopes-the-meaning-of-ahmadinejads-victory.htm