viewpoint
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Iran's own
June 12 |
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By Reuben Abati The Guardian
Friday June19,2009 |
THE unfolding electoral crisis in Iran
reminds us of the crisis of
democratization in our own context and
the people's response to electoral
outcomes. All of a sudden, Iranians are
looking like us, some 17 years ago when
Nigerians trooped out en masse to insist
on respect for the people's will and
sovereignty. On Friday last week, Iran
had its own version of June 12 when it
held its general elections. No election
has been annulled, that is one critical
difference, but the people's insistence
that the integrity of the ballot should
be respected and that the people's vote
should be allowed to count are issues
that Nigerians, faced with the
transposition of electoral fraud into
state art, can relate to. Iran is in
great turmoil, witnessing in the last
week alone, demonstrations and protests
of a scale unseen since the 1979 Islamic
Revolution.
The streets of Tehran have been taken
over by hundreds of thousands of angry
youths who insist that the Presidential
election of Friday June 12 is fraudulent
and the result is unacceptable. "We will
die but count our votes", they said. At
the end of the June 12 election, the
theocratic Council of the Guardians of
the Islamic Revolution, a body that
wields more power than the elected
President, awarded victory to incumbent
President Mahmoud Ahmadijenad, with 62.
6% of the votes, and the main opposition
leader former Prime Minister Hossein
Moussavi got 33.7%. The protesters are
mainly supporters of Moussavi. For a
week, many Iranians have been wearing
the colour green, the colour of
Moussavi's party, even the Iranian
national team in the first half of a
World Cup qualifier match against South
Korea, wore the green armband.
Yesterday, which was declared a day of
mourning, the protesters wore black.
How come the Iranians held their own
Presidential election on June 12? What
concidence! I think of the practical
symbolism of the date for Nigerians but
I also lament how the spirit of protest,
of outrage and righteous indignation
appears to be dying slowly in our land.
In 1993, Nigerians stood up to the
military dictatorship in Nigeria and
challenged the junta's attempts to annul
a democratic election. What we are
seeing in Iran is equally an expression
of rebellion against dictatorship. Their
rebellion is against the mismanagement
of the economy by Ahmadijenad's
government, and the over-bearing
authority of the Council of Guardians
which uses theocracy as a tool of
fascism. Before now, the world had
witnessed this kind of people power on
display in Czechoslovakia (the Velvet
Revolution, 1989), in Georgia (the Rose
Revolution, 2003), in Ukraine (the
Orange Revolution, 2004/2005) and in
Brazil when the people chased out
President Fernando Collor de Mello
(1992). It is a subtle reminder of how
democracy rests on the power of popular
opinion.
But in witnessing this people-dimension
of democracy, we wonder what is it that
has gone wrong with Nigerians. The same
Nigerians who protested against
electoral fraud in 1965 in Western
Nigeria, who also rebelled in Ondo State
in 1983 when the National Party of
Nigeria attempted to steal the people's
mandate; the same Nigerians who in 1993
-up till 1998- threw eveything that they
could summon into anti-military
protests, have suddenly become
apathetic. Worse electoral fraud has
been committed in Nigeria since 1999.
But after every election, Nigerians
crack jokes out of the theft of the
people's votes, and move on with their
lives. As soon as the protests in Iran
began, someone sent me a text titled
BREAKING NEWS with the following
content: "Just to let you know that
Professor Maurice Iwu returned from
Tehran at the weekend after offering the
Iranians Nigeria's technical assistance
on how to conduct elections".
I had once argued that democracy for
Nigerians has become a kind of
blackmail. The politicians and their
agents manipulate the votes and declare
the results that they want, but the
people allow it to pass, because they do
not want to create more tension in their
lives. Elections that have been held
since 2007, after the various rulings by
the electoral tribunals have been just
as problematic but there are no large
numbers of Nigerians taking to the
streets to voice their opinions. In the
recent re-run Gubernatorial elections in
Ekiti, there was a semblance of protest,
and a few electoral observers got their
heads battered, but protests these days
are synthetic. Half of the protesters
are rented; they defend democracy for a
fee. When will Nigerians rediscover the
urge to defend their own future?
Rediscovering our capacity to be shocked
and outraged is crucial to the task of
electoral reform.
It is not always that protests lead to a
fulfilment of the people's expectations,
In Iran, it won't. Not now. But a
momentum is afoot which may eventually
in the future lead to the displacement
of the fascistic Islamic regime.
Protests make loud statements and put
the dictator on notice. Ahmadinejad may
have a Ph.D in engineering, and he may
have mastered the rhetoric of
provocation, but he is a stooge of the
clerics. By last year, long before the
election, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's
Supreme leader, had predicted that
Ahmadinejad will be in power for another
five years. But the sub-text of the
on-going protest is that the people are
saying they no longer want that kind of
democracy that is vetoed by the mullahs.
The Council of Guardians has ordered a
recount of the votes in some of the
constituencies, today, Khamenei will
address the people at Friday worship.
There is no likelihood that the
elections will be cancelled, or that
Moussavi's share of the votes will
increase. But the underbelly of the
power class in Iran has been exposed.
Moussavi's supporters are mostly young
people and women. Young Iranians want a
different country in which they can have
a voice. Iranian women want greater
freedoms, but these freedoms are denied
by the Council of Guardians and
Ahmadinejad under whom even little
freedoms hitherto enjoyed by Iranian
women have been withdrawn. For 30 years
the mullahs have dictated the pace in
Iran, what is happening is a showdown
between the conservatives and the
reformists. And yet no one has burnt
down houses, the protesters are not
wielding machetes, and there has been no
indication that the protesters are on
the pay-roll of a political party.
Dictators everywhere behave the same
way. General Abacha threw people into
jail. He burned down newspaper houses.
He gagged the media. Ahmadinejad's
government is clamping down on the
people. The basiji- the band of thugs
who try to enforce the will of the
state- target people's faces and
testicles. Eight demonstrators have died
in the last week. Opposition figures
have been clamped into detention.
International journalists have been
advised to leave the country and
internet sites have been blocked. But
still in the age of information
technology, the Iranian crisis still
gets out to the world. It is on Twitter.
It is on Facebook. It is on CNN.
Technology has changed the face of
governance and human relations forever.
It is amazing to see how in Iran, the
revolutionaries of 1979, the successors
of the Ayatollah, are losing grip, just
because they didn't allow a transparent
electoral system. The clerics selected
the five candidates that took part in
the June 12 Presidential election out of
a total of 140 candidates. What criteria
did they use? They didn't have to
explain. The grandchildren of the
revolution want a different template of
power and control. In the last week,
they have managed to convey their
discontent.
In the end, there will be no regime
change, the incumbent President won most
of the votes in rural Iran, and he is
still very popular among the people, but
it is clear that there are fissures in
that society. The legitimacy of the
present governance arrangements has been
effectively called to question. There is
a message here for all forces that hold
on to power at all costs: sooner or
later, there will be a time and ocassion
for accounting.
The West, which has never liked
Ahmadinejad is triumphant. Newspapers in
Europe are celebrating the supposed wind
of change that is sweeping across Iran.
Well, not quite. There is a touch of
mischief in Western responses to the
Iranian situation. Ahmadinejad is not a
friend of the West. His anti-Semitic,
anti-Zionist statements including a
declaration once that Israel should be
wiped off the page of time has made him
a persona non grata. His insistence on
Iran's uranium enrichment programme has
brought him into conflict with the
United States, Israel and the United
Nations. Israelis say he is a modern-day
Amalekite. Moussavi's name sounds Jewish
and there are Jews in Iran, but regime
change may not resolve the question of
Iran. The mullahs are not about to
disappear. And Ahmadijenad's dismissal
of all this as "passions after a soccer
match" may be informed by the
ineffectuality of earlier protests in
1999, 2003, 2006, and 2008.
The United States has been cautious not
to be seen to be supporting the
opposition, for were it do so, that
would immediately unify the proud
Iranian nation. Moussavi is promising a
detente in diplomatic relations, greater
freedom for women - he holds hands with
his wife in public (!). His wife has
also called for an end to misogyny. But
like many Iranians, his views about
Israel and the future of Palestine as
well as Iran's nuclear weapons programme,
are typical. President Obama is right:
there isn't much difference between
Ahmadinejad and Moussavi. If change must
come to Iran, it will come from the
people themselves not through the
promptings of the Western media imposing
its own notions of democratic
governance. The worst case scenario is a
drawn out civil conflict in Iran between
supporters of the status quo and those
who want change. But can the world
afford such implosion in the Middle
East? Can the world afford to have Iran
go the way of Iraq? The West and the
United States must make no bones about
it: If Iran has become an axis of evil,
they helped in building its foundations
with their duplicitous politics of
expediency, dating back to the 1950s.
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