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Iranian Election: The Revolution Will Be Youtubed (pg. 4)
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| hardcore trancer |
Iran: 12 students reported killed in crackdown after violent clashes
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/200...lection-results
At least 12 people may have died in violent clashes with Iran's security forces following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election, _according to reports from the country.
The reported fatalities have come amid a brutal crackdown on students, apparently aimed at quelling a wave of campus rebellions that authorities fear could spill over to the wider population.
A Farsi website, Balatarin, carried an unconfirmed report that seven people had been killed in the southern city of Shiraz following confrontations with riot police at the local university. Five busloads of plainclothes officers had been sent to confront the demonstrators during Sunday's protests, but were said to have been unable to prevent them from being joined by members of the public and marching to one of the city's main squares. It is unclear whether all those said to have died were students.
The Guardian understands that five students may also have died in clashes at Tehran University early on Sunday. The students – named as Fatemeh Barati, Kasra Sharafi, Mobina Ehterami, Kambiz Shoaee and Mohsen Imani – are believed to have been buried today in Behesht-e-Zahra, a famous cemetery in Tehran, reportedly without their families being informed.
Autnews, a student website, claimed that plain clothes officers used firearms against students after forcing their way onto the campus. Students were said to have sought refuge in toilets after police raided halls of residence, where rooms were ransacked and beds set on fire.
Tonight Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran's parliament, appointed a committee of MPs to investigate the reports.
The reported fatalities appeared to be backed up by one witness, who said a force of around 300 plainclothes and riot police joined basij forces (militia volunteers) to attack the students.
"We had nowhere to hide but the toilets and bathrooms, and they shouted: 'You traitors to the Islamic republic, you bastards, leave the building or we'll shoot you all.' Many students were severely wounded – we could hear injured students groaning and shouting for help," the witness said.
"At 3am they announced on loudspeakers: 'If you evacuate the building we won't harm you. Otherwise, you'll all be injured or killed.' All the students then came out of the building in lines, with their hands on their heads. The police hit them with batons and some started to shout that they had conquered the dorms. Eventually they let us go back to our rooms but at least 10 had been shot, some appeared to have been killed and hundreds were injured."
Another witness, Majidreza Sobhani, 21, a mechanical engineering student, said police smashed locks to force their way into students' rooms. "I can't describe what they did to me and friends. Just go to our dorms and see what our rooms look like," he said.
Violent incidents were reported at Isfahan University, where 60 students were taken into custody following clashes that left halls of residence badly damaged. Some students were said to have been injured after being thrown from upstairs windows.
Protests also took place at Hamedan University and Babol University in Mazandaran province on the Caspian Sea, where demonstrations are said to have spread to four towns after police attacked students.
Riot police surrounded the campus of Tabriz University, which has historically been a hotbed of radical protest.
Anger was apparent too at Amir Kabir University in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad was forced to flee the campus after angry protests more than two years ago. Some 150 lecturers and around 500 students staged a sit-in at the campus mosque, mirroring an action by academics at another Tehran institution, Sharif University, on Sunday.
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| hardcore trancer |
This list was being passed around among the resistance in Iran today:
1. Remove Khamenei from supreme leader because he doesn't qualify as a fair supreme leader
2. Remove Ahmadinejad from president because he took it forcefully and unlawfully
3. Put Ayatollah Montazeri as supreme leader until a review group for the ghanooneh asasi ( "constitution" ) is set up
4. Recognize Mousavi as the official president
5. A goverment by Mousavi and start a reform of the constitution
6. Free all political prisoners without any ifs ands or buts, right away
7. Call off any secret organization such as "gasht ershad"
To me this sounds like someone is trying to add more fuel to the fire. :o |
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| Clovis |
| quote: | JUNE 15, 2009
REALISM AND IRAN
The brutal apparent fraud taking place in Iran puts the Obama Administration, and anyone who cares about both American security and human rights, in an extremely difficult position. For eight years, George W. Bush maintained that there was no tension, let alone contradiction, between “our interests and our values.” The result of this simplistic thinking was to turn American foreign policy into a sustained exercise in hypocrisy and double standards: we declared ourselves the world’s guarantor of freedom, while ignoring or explaining away Mubarak’s repression in Egypt, the Central Asian dictatorships that gave us basing rights, and our own misdeeds and misbegotten policies in the war on terror. We told struggling democrats across the globe that we were on their side, raising their hopes only to disappoint them, while refusing on principle to take the necessary steps toward negotiating with odious regimes like Ahmadinejad’s in Tehran. Bush’s soaring second Inaugural in defense of freedom everywhere turned out to be an exercise in moral narcissism: it made the Administration sound righteous while doing precious little to advance rights. By the time Bush left office, we had the worst of all outcomes: a policy that paralyzed American diplomacy, crippled the pursuit of our own interests, offered a token support for human rights only where we saw fit, and earned the world’s cynicism and scorn.
Obama inherited this self-defeating mess and has quickly moved to clean it up: the Cairo speech, the balancing rhetoric on Israel and Palestine, and the initiative toward Iran. His secretary of state downplayed human rights in Burma, pointing out that a more strident approach had failed utterly to change the regime’s behavior. The new President understood that the U.S. could no longer take a high-handed approach: the world had long since stopped listening, and the language of freedom and democracy had been so deeply tainted that the cleansing will take years. That’s why the passages in the Cairo speech on human rights and women’s rights came after extremism, after Israel and Palestine, after nuclear weapons, and had a careful tone. There’s too much wreckage to sort through before an American President can tell other countries to live up to a standard set by us.
The key phrase in Obama’s remarks on the world stage is “mutual respect and mutual interests.” National interest is the north star of foreign-policy realists, and the turn in rhetoric has aligned Obama far more with George Bush the father than the son. Again, this was a necessary correction. It was folly to refuse to talk to enemies in Tehran and Damascus when doing so would have at least put our interests on the table, and failing to allowed Iran to move full-speed ahead with its nuclear program. The new Administration is grown-up enough to grasp that interests and values are often at odds, and it made sense to say, in effect: interests now, human rights later. Until this past weekend.
Iran’s electoral fraud, and the violent crackdown that immediately followed, have drawn such a muted response from Washington that you can almost hear the backstage anxiety and confusion. The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said: “There’s no reason to think the regime is not in control.” Hillary Clinton went slightly farther: “We, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide. We obviously hope the outcome reflects the genuine will and desire of the Iranian people.” Yesterday, on “Meet the Press”, Vice-President Biden took the strongest position yet: “It sure looks like the way they’re suppressing speech, the way they’re suppressing crowds, the way in which people are being treated, that there’s some real doubt.” Coming from Biden, who doesn’t mince words, this is pretty tame stuff. At this point, the European Union is well ahead of the United States in its stance on the events in Iran.
I understand that the Administration wants to let the chaos in Iran play itself out without committing to a position that might be rendered hollow by events. I understand and agree with its continued insistence on pursuing a policy of negotiation that’s in America’s interest. I understand that this head-on collision between interests and values is not at all easy to navigate. But “realism” should no more be an ideological fetish under Obama than “freedom” was under Bush. There was, for example, nothing realistic in an unnamed Administration official’s claim over the weekend that stealing an election and putting down a revolt in blood would cause Ahmadinejad to “feel that because of public pressure, he wants to reduce Iran’s isolation. That might also cause engagement to proceed more swiftly.” The exact opposite is true, as the Iranian President gleefully told a press conference on Saturday. The hard-liners are in the saddle, and so far they’ve shown no interest whatsoever in Dennis Ross’s overtures—perhaps because, as Laura Secor (my wife and main authority on all things Iranian) wrote two months ago, talking to America cuts out the heart of their claim to be the revolution’s heirs and the Islamic Republic’s only legitimate rulers.
In much of the punditry calling for dialogue with Iran, there’s been a strange naivete about the true nature of the regime—a confusion between the sophistication and tolerance of the Iranian people, and their rulers, who have always taken the most brutal measures to hold onto power. Some advocates of negotiation seem to think that the resistance and stupidity have all been on our side—that if only America showed a little respect for Iran, called it by its rightful name of “Islamic Republic,” stopped talking about carrots and sticks (which Iranians associate with donkeys), then Iran’s rulers would be glad to start talking. It turns out that they have more to fear from talk than we do—in fact, at the moment it’s hard to know exactly what they have to gain by it and a lot easier to see what they have to lose. Perhaps they have a keener sense of their own interests than American commentators, so obsessed with America’s own behavior, imagined.
With riot police and armed militiamen beating and, in a few reported cases, killing unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Iran’s cities, for the Obama Administration to continue parsing equivocal phrases serves no purpose other than to make it look feckless. Part of realism is showing that you have a clear grasp of reality—that you know the difference between decency and barbarism when both are on display for the whole world to see. A stronger American stand—taken, as much as possible, in concert with European countries and through multilateral organizations—would do more to improve America’s negotiating position than weaken it. Acknowledging the compelling voices of the desperate young Iranians who, after all, only want their votes counted, would not deep-six the possibility of American-Iranian talks. Ahmadinejad and his partners in the clerical-military establishment will talk to us exactly when and if they think it’s in their interest. Right now, they don’t appear to. And the tens of millions of Iranians who voted for change and are the long-term future of that country will always remember what America said and did when they put their lives on the line for their values.
POSTED BY GEORGE PACKER
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blo...gepacker/?xrail
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| Lemonad |
Exactly 30 years after the revolution, it's happening again.
If you read about what the Shah did to calm down tensions; it's very reminiscent to what's happening now.
Hopefully the Iranians can stand still for a couple more weeks. The protestors being killed aren't criminals as Ahmadinejad calls them, but true Martyrs.
Hopefully it doesn't repeat itself like the last revolution. Iraq knew Iran was weak from the revolution so they attacked. Hopefully Israel doesn't follow suit, as there will be major consequences for them. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lemonad
Exactly 30 years after the revolution, it's happening again. |
It is happening again and my guess is the that the US is once again behind it. I just hope the people are smarter now and dont fall for bull lies again.:(
What is sad is that this Mosavi character is very unknown to most it seems like he just came out of nowhere, sort of like how khomeini came to Iran with alot of help from outside. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
It is happening again and my guess is the that the US is once again behind it. I just hope the people are smarter now and dont fall for bull lies again.:( |
and what role did the US play in the rigging of the iranian election do you think? |
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| The17sss |
| quote: | Originally posted by Clovis
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God Clovis that's the worst article I've ever read. Let me put it in summary: It's Bush's fault, Obama inherited a mess, thank god we have a president who is above it all. Same theme of all brown-nosing politicos that carry Obama's water.
The author doesn't seem to understand that all 495 initial candidates were hand picked by the mullahs.... it's a joke; there's no primary like there is here, and whoever the mullahs want to be president will be. I submit that a motive for staying with Ahmadinejad is precisely to spit in the face of Obama and his Cairo speech. Those people (Mullahs/Khamenei) are supreme-leader dictatorial rulers... does the author of that article think they want some young upstart American telling them they need to embrace democracy and decide what's relevant and what isn't in their warped political process? That they will allow worldwide news to be accepted that Obama affected their politics? God.. these people are so sadly desperate to push the idea that with one speech, The One changed the state of middle east politics.
The one thing the author was right about is some of Europe having the balls to denounce right away while our Prez hangs back scared to take a stand one way or the other. After 3 days, the NY Times reports that the State Department "declined to condemn the Iranian security forces for their crackdown on street protesters." Menwhile, Angela Merkel had the stones to stand up and denounce it. Denouce it, Barry.. where are you! Stand with the people of Iran... ing fight now, or fight later. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
and what role did the US play in the rigging of the iranian election do you think? |
Perhaps not directly but Iam positive there is alot happening behind the scenes and CIA is working over time to make the regime change in Iran a reality. After all these protests and instabilities is the perfect opportunity for them.
I found this article to be interesting:
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/2009...iranian_reality
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In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.
The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.
The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than the those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran
Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.
Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.
There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.
Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.
Ahmadinejad’s Popularity
It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.
First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.
Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.
Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.
Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.
For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.
Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.
The Road Ahead: More of the Same
The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution. Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.
Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)
What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.
On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.
For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on. |
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| Lemonad |
hardcore trancer, I'm Iranian too but i think you're nuts man, get that tin foil hat off your head.
You know what i love about this situation, that it's the perfect excuse for people to have stood again Khamanei. They couldn't have organized these kinds of things in normal everyday life as there are secret agents everywhere.
So Khamanei and Ahmadinejad screwed up big time IMO. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by The17sss
This is all Barack Obama's fault! |
A good point was made yesterday by Andrew Sullivan - that the vote likely reflected the aspirations of the Iranian people to live in a more open and free society exemplified by the transfer of power from Bush to Obama in January. Obama's Cairo speech likely didn't factor into that, but his story probably did.
In regards to Obama's hesitancy to issue statements, I'm actually ok with that. I'm of the opinion that saying anything at this moment can be used by the hard-liners to game up support. I can see the government PR campaign now: "See, evil America wants Mousavi to win, they are behind his candidacy!" There's really nothing to be gained from getting involved, other than to placate hardliners here in the U.S. who salivate at the thought of dissing Ahmedinejad. |
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| jerZ07002 |
this is a great picture:
It's a beautiful thing that common iranians are fighting for this. Unfortunately, violence is a common and somewhat necessary element in these sorts of populist revolts. I hope the people of Iran persist in this fight (even though from what i've read this mousavi dude isn't exactly a democrat in the western sense).
And to trancer - how is the US behind a populist protest? How is it possible that the CIA is getting perhaps millions of iranians to protest? That's just a ridiculous claim. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| So what are the odds on Al Franken winning the recount in Iran? |
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