Last week, I did an interview with Sky News about the 1979
Iranian Revolution, the recent presidential “election” and the reformists, a
short version of which has been aired. In it I talked about my experience of the
revolution and of the rapidly emerging freedoms which followed it, the
confrontation of the dictatorial and democratic fronts over the next two years,
and the June 1981 coup against the first president. Then I talked about the “election”, which
more than ever demonstrated the reformists’ Machiavellian approach to politics
as they violated all their declared principles and conditions for the sake of power.
This led them to rally around a conservative security candidate who was
involved in Iran-Gate scandal (1986-87) and supported the bloody suppression of
a student uprising in 1999. I argued
that their lack of ethics and short sightedness will soon lead to the
disillusionment of their young supporters and thus to the abandonment in the
hope of reform, and that the paralysing grey area of reform which has until now
prevented uprising for structural change will be lifted.
The analysis was done before the “election”, and those who
voted for change, not realizing that no real change can ever take place without
removing the absolute power of the supreme leader who has all power but no
accountability, are now experiencing a honeymoon. Unfortunately, they do not
realize that the hangover will soon kick in.
As I wrote previously, the real winners of this election were
Khamenei and the millions of people who boycotted it. Khamenei won in one sense by beheading the
reformists through prohibiting Khatami and Rafsanjani from running, still, successfully
forcing all reformists, from religious, religious nationalists, leftists, and seculars,
to give him recognition. From now on they cannot play the opposition card any
longer. He succeeded in doing so because, like himself, the reformists also only
follow principles of power. Khamenei won
in another sense because he no longer needs to drink the poison chalice of
negotiating with Western powers and accepting most of their terms over the
nuclear issue. His president will now do it for him and he easily argues that,
as people voted for Rouhani, he respect’s people’s votes.
Also, we should not forget, as Profressor Mehran Mostafavi
had demonstrated, that the regime has once again rapidly inflated the number of
voters, which was even lower than 50%. We remember that once Karubi revealed
the regime has a history of doubling the number of votes but used to do it
proportionally so that no candidate could complain. Calculating the number of
ballot boxes and the opening hours, Professor Mostafavi has shown that the only
way the regime’s claim that nearly 37 million people voted can be true is if we
accept that the average time for a voter to enter the polling station, cast two
votes (one for the president and the other for town council) and leave was 75
seconds, which is unlikey. He also
argues that the percentage of votes for Rouhani was much higher than 50% and that
his team might have been right when they were initially saying that his actual
percentage was 62%, but the regime, which was counting votes behind closed
doors and away from journalists and observers, kept his percentage at around
50%. This is because it was still deciding whether to go to a second round, and
finally decided to declare him to be the winner but deprive him of a landslide
victory.
Finally, as I argued before the “election”, this show of democracy
has helped to remove the grey area of reformism. This is good news for Iranians
who are struggling for independence, freedom, democracy, development and social
justice.
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