THE RECENT Iranian
presidential elections were a triumph for the principle of one
man, one vote. And the man with the vote this time, as always, was
the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran’s
new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may well be the choice of the
urban poor, the anti-sleaze candidate and the favourite of the
military. But ultimately, he’s the winner because he’s also
the guy who did best with one key demographic — bearded
sixtysomething clerics called Ali who enjoy wielding supreme power
within theocratic republics.
Even before the first vote was cast, a thousand potential
presidential candidates were barred from running by the state’s
Guardian Council, itself hand-picked by Ayatollah Khamenei. The
two rounds of voting that Iran just held were charades, Potemkin
exercises designed to give the outside world the illusion that the
Islamic Republic could hold an open election and sustain the lie
that its leaders enjoy popular backing.
The television pictures of voters queueing to get to the polls
were taken from previous elections, the polling stations
themselves were policed by fundamentalist militias, ballot papers
were held in reserve to ensure the vote went the prescribed way
and the figures eventually announced were manufactured in a
fashion that would have brought a tear to the eye of Saddam
himself.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the second round of the presidential
election with 17,248,782 votes. In the first round he got just
5,710,354 votes. In one week he secured the support of an extra
11,500,000 people, trebling his popularity, and scooping
dramatically more votes than those earned in the first round by
all the “hardline” candidates put together. All while the
recorded turnout actually dropped. The figures just don’t add
up. And that’s because they’re made up. No independent
observers are allowed to monitor what happens in polling stations,
to scrutinise ballot boxes or attend counts. That would be to let
daylight in upon the magic of theologically guided democracy.
Instead, Iran’s ruling fundamentalist elite makes its
dispositions, plucks the appropriate figures out of the air to
lend support their choice, and then European chancelleries rush to
play their appointed role in this farce by welcoming the
people’s choice to his new office.
There is, however, one important difference between this
Iranian election and previous polls. It confirms the change in
strategic direction decided on by Ayatollah Khamenei and his
allies in the past 18 months or so, and apparent in their conduct
of the 2004 parliamentary elections. That poll was every much an
exercise in chicanery as last week’s election, with huge numbers
of candidates excluded even from consideration and comprehensive
result- rigging. But what was significant, and different, about
both these elections was the Iranian regime’s decision to
abandon their previous policy of fundamentalism with a human face
and replace it with something altogether more uncompromising.
Before 2004 the Iranian leadership had allowed figures to
emerge who were portrayed as reformists, such as former President
Mohammad Khatami. He was sold to the West, and indeed to Iranian
democrats, as a moderniser. His election was designed to lure the
West into a policy of conciliation rather than confrontation with
the Islamic Republic, while mollifying growing popular demands
within Iran for regime change. Having succeeded in embroiling the
EU’s foreign ministers in negotiation (Jack Straw has been to
Tehran more than any other foreign capital apart from Brussels and
Washington) Iran then proceeded to see just how robust the
Europeans were prepared to be. They escalated their rhetoric
against Israel, calling for the state’s annihilation, escalated
their nuclear programme in defiance of every international
agreement, and they escalated their own campaign of repression,
imprisoning democrats, torturing them and releasing them on
“medical leave” so families could see the horrific price to be
paid for dissent.
Not only did Iran pay no price for this behaviour, it continued
to enjoy the EU’s flattering attentions, not least because
European leaders were desperate to show that their softly-softly
negotiation could be more successful in the Middle East than
American “bellicosity”. The biggest victims of this process
have been the democratic Iranian opposition, who have been
rewarded for their bravery in standing up to fundamentalism by
seeing their oppressors indulged by the EU. The Iranian regime’s
decision now to select a President who does not even make a
pretence of being “reformist” is designed to crush the spirit
of the reform movement, by indicating that the regime no longer
feels the need to make even cosmetic concessions. And its also
designed to exploit the constitutional weakness of Europeans who
do not have the will to hold Iran to account, as well as the
apparent weakness of a US President judged to lack the political
capital to deal with Iraq and Iran at the same time.
The Iranian regime’s clear belief that the West is weak
suggests that it is preparing to press ahead with its ambitions to
acquire a nuclear weapons capability, a goal that may be just
months away. If the West is not to confirm a potentially fatal
reputation for infirmity, we need to strike back, using the
strongest allies we have in the region: the Iranian people
themselves.
We need to provide hope to the millions who boycotted elections
they knew would be frauds, run by crooks, to favour fascists.
Western leaders should be asking Iran’s new President what he
will do to free his country’s dissidents, like the heroic
journalist Akbar Ganji who has suffered horrendously for daring to
expose the corruption and criminality of Iran’s elites. Why
isn’t our Foreign Secretary standing up for him, and his
colleagues, as western politicians once stood up for Sakharov and
Solzenhitsyn?
The longer our leaders remain silent in the battle for
democracy in Iran, the more likely we are to see a far more
ominous conflict escalate — between Iran and the democracies.