Post-Election Violence In Iran

People have been protesting in Iran in at least four or five cities: Tehran, Shiraz, Rasht, Mashhad and Tabtiz (which is now under some kind of lockdown). There is just too much going to follow in any coherent way right now, but my wife and I are glued to our computer screens (more or less). Here’s a website that seems to have a large number of pictures and videos of what’s going on. There has not been this kind and level of unrest since the 1979 revolution. Protesters have set buildings on fire; and we heard that they even attacked the Ministry of the Interior, where the votes were counted, though I am not sure about this, since I have not been able to find again the page where I either heard or read it. (We’ve been bouncing from page to page so much it’s hard to keep track.) My wife says that now everything depends on how long the people who are protesting are able and willing to keep the pressure on. This has been a long time coming.

Update: Tehran Bureau is another good source of news and analysis.

Another update: I posted this text to It’s All Connected as well:

So my wife and I spent a few hours this evening glued to our computer screens reading and watching the news coming out of Iran about the post-election protests and violence that took place throughout the country after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “victory” was announced. (If you’re on Facebook this page is a good place to start looking, and there are also, of course, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and all the other major news outlets.) My wife talked to her brother in Tehran, who told us that protests went on well into early morning hours; there was gunfire in the area of Tehran where he lives–and it’s important to note that the protests spread to other cities as well: Shiraz, Mashhad, Rasht, Tabriz (which was under curfew last I heard), and I read that Ahvaz was under curfew as well–and one of my Facebook friends posted that an Iranian blogger she knows claims 50 people are dead. One guy on Twitter said his father had a truckload of ballots slated for burning; another said his uncle, a cop, told him they had orders to burn ballots; and everyone is saying the streets of Iran have not seen this kind of unrest since the Revolution in 1979. This image is from TehranBureau

And here is a YouTube video that you can find on TehranBureau’s page of videos:

I have seen pictures of buildings set on fire; people using twitter to report violence at universities, the rumored resignation of the faculty from one university and more; and of course we can never know just how many of these individual reports are accurate, but I have read some interesting, initial political analysis. Here is an excerpt from Juan Cole’s brief piece on TehranBureau:

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. 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.

2. 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. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

3. 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.

4. 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.

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

6. 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. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation 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 has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, 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.

I have been reading this and reading through all the material I can find because of course I feel personally involved. I worry for the safety of my in-laws who are in Tehran; I think about the Iranians I know and the aspirations they have for the country they were, most of them, forced by the Islamic Revolution to leave, either because their lives were in danger, or their parents’ lives were in danger, or because they just couldn’t take living under a totalitarian theocracy anymore; and I think as well about how a McCain administration might have reacted to what is going on in Iran now, and I am grateful I don’t have to find out how close what I think would come to the truth; and I think about how the circumstances of this election in Iran leaves President Obama with no good choices in terms of how to proceed with his agenda for engaging that country, and of the cynicism of the people here who were hoping for an Ahmadinejad victory precisely because they wanted to see Obama’s strategy of engagement scuttled. I think about all this and I really don’t know what to say about it that hasn’t already been said, and yet I feel like I have to say something.

While my wife and I were eating dinner, she said that she hopes this time does not turn out to be like other times, when there were a couple of days of protest and then everything went back to the status quo, and I suggested that will depend on what the leadership of the opposition does. If they find a way to keep the pressure on the regime, it seems to me, people will be willing to keep coming out into the streets. If Moussavi caves in, however, what purpose would be served by continuing to protest? And while we were talking about this, I remembered something I read in the Introduction to A. Hart Edwards’ 1911 translation of Saadi’s Bustan. On page 16, Edwards writes:

Although Persian is only yet in the process of readjusting her ideas of government and the prerogatives of rulers, principles more advanced than seem compatible with despotism have been for many centuries current among her people in theory, at least, if not in practice. Muhammad said that a little practice with much knowledge was better than much practice with little knowledge. On that ground Persia has defence [sic], for the knowledge certainly was there. What could better describe the true relationship between king and people that Sadi’s thirteenth-century epigram?

Subjects are as the root and the king is as the tree,
And the tree, O son, gains strength from the root.

Not many months ago the autocratic tree at Teheran [sic] was rudely severed from its root; perchance the successors of Abu Bakr [Saadi’s patron and ruler] were not of those to whom “the words of Sadi are agreeable” [a phrase that occurs at various times throughout Bustan].

Edwards was referring to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, which was going on while he was making his translation, and he was saying that many of the values that drive resistance to autocratic government have been part of Iran’s culture for centuries, even though Iran’s rulers had rarely acted on them. More specifically, though, Edwards was making the point that Saadi is one of the poets in the Iranian canon for whom those values are most central to his writing. I have written elsewhere about Saadi’s most famous lines, and how they need to be understood not merely as important liberal sentiment, but as a speaking of truth to power:

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you forfeit the right to be called human.

These lines, however, are about a philosophy, not a practice, and Saadi was also concerned with saying something about the practical aspects of ruling. The poem from which Edwards took the couplet he quoted, for example, is the first in the chapter called “Justice.” It is a poem the lesson of which the Islamic Republic has shown, in this election, that it has not yet learned. Here is the first strophe:

I’ve heard that with his dying breaths Nushirvan
advised his son Hormuz on how to rule:
“Guarantee the poor their peace of mind.
Do not allow your privilege to bind you.
None who call your kingdom home will be
at peace if privilege is all you live for.
No judge will find a shepherd innocent
who slept and let the wolf among the sheep.
Go! Stand guard! Protect their impoverished lives.
The crown you wear would not exist without them.
A tree, my son, is nourished through its roots.
Just so, a monarch draws his kingdom’s strength
through those he rules. Do not betray their trust
unless you have to; you’ll find yourself rootless.

Nushirvan was a king known for his compassion and sense of justice; Hormuz, on the other hand, was known as cruel and unjust.

It’s hard sitting here in the United States to take as seriously as Iran would like me to its assertion that it is a democracy. Even had there been no electoral fraud, it is difficult to see, from the perspective of a country where there is a separation of church and state, and where there is no ideological body that approves the religious integrity of political candidates before they run, how a country where such a body exists, where only the governmentally approved candidates are allowed to run for president, can be called a democracy. Nonetheless, the people of Iran chose in this election to endorse that process by turning out to vote in record numbers. This time, for them, it was personal. The Iranian government betrayed them personally and was, at least for a day and a night, as rootless as Saadi predicted it would be. Hopefully, those roots will not allow themselves to be forced back into the same old soil, but will find instead fertile new ground.