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700 people gathered at the Pfluger pedestrian bridge in Austin, Texas on July 23 to mourn those killed or injured in Iran.
Here is a poem writen by Ed Seymour, an Austin local who participated in last night’s vigil:
Silence
Seems golden
Seems to have been noticed
Seems to have spoken
Without speaking
For hundreds
To have gathered
Without speaking
Speaks volumes
How they tied their tongues
Without strings attached
And maintained
Complete lack of words, is amazing
The resulting quiet
Was found
By TV
And broadcast
Perhaps
The reason
Was this is so unique
To find quiet, in the middle of city
With such
Lack
Of Noise
The message was loud
Ed Seymour
06/23/09
A newly released statistical study of the rigged election by Chatham House raises enormous questions about the validity of the Interior Ministry’s reported vote totals. And Mousavi himself is making the point, in detailed fashion, that the vote was bogus. According to The Nation’s Robert Dreyfus,
The Chatham House analysis, while wonky and full of detailed charts, provides the clearest evidence yet that Ahmadinejad and Co. rigged the vote.It shows, for instance, that in at least ten provinces — in order to have amassed the vote totals given to him — Ahmadinejad would have had to have won all the voters who backed him in 2005, all of the voters who, last time voted for the centrist candidacy of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, all of the voters who, last time, sat out the election and didn’t vote at all, and — on top of that — up to 44 percent of the voters who, in 2005, backed the reformist slate!Example: Ahmadinejad won 765,000 votes in Hamedan province. In 2005, he received 195,000. To win the additional 570,000 votes, Ahmadinejad would have to have won all 218,000 voters who didn’t vote in 2005, all 175,000 Rafsanjani voters, and nearly a quarter of the 322,000 voters who cast their ballots for the reformists. Keep in mind that most, if not all, of the non-voters in 2005 would be people disgusted with and cynical about voting at all, the vast majority of whom would probably have cast their ballots for Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, or Mohsen Rezai this time, if they voted at all.In province after province, the data hold.The Chatham House data also show, conclusively, that rural voters do not support Ahmadinejad, contrary to the oft-repeated myth in the media and among many analysts. In 2005, for instance, the report shows a perfect correlation: The more rural the province, the lower Ahmadinejad’s vote in 2005. Why? “Much of Iran’s rural population is comprised of ethnic minorities: Lors, Baluch, Kurdish, and Arab amongst others. These ethnic minorities have a history of voting Reformist,” says the report. In 2005, they voters overwhelmingly for Karroubi and for Mostafa Moin, not Ahmadinejad. The report, backed by detailed statistical analysis, shows that to have won the support he claims to have achieved in rural areas, Ahmadinejad would have to have won fully half of the reformist vote, and notion that the report calls “highly implausible.”It also notes, wryly, that “in two conservative provinces, –Mazandaran and Yazd — a turnout of more than 100 percent was recorded.”Rather stunningly, Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani — a fiercely conservative partisan who, nonetheless, was a backer of Ahmadinejad’s conservative opponent in the June 12 election, Mohsen Rezai — has declared that the vote may be suspect. Here’s what he said:“The Guardian Council should use every possible means to build trust and convince the protestors that their complaints will be thoroughly looked into. A majority of people are of the opinion that the actual election result is different from what was officially announced. The opinion should be respected and a line should be drawn between them and the rioters and miscreants. … Although the Guardian Council is made up of religious individuals, I wish certain members would not side with a certain presidential candidate.”By “certain presidential candidate,” of course, Larijani means Ahmadinejad. Mousavi himself isn’t pulling punches. He said that “disgusting measures” were used to fix the election, adding, in a letter to the mullahs of the Guardian Council:“All these counts of irregularities plus many others that were mentioned in previous letters . . . are reasons to cancel the election nationwide. … The result was reversed. … The number of mobile ballot boxes was increased significantly, and there were no monitors present at those stations. Our representatives were not allowed to be present at the mobile ballot boxes during transportation. Considering the fact that there were 14,000 of those, that gave them the ability to carry out any violation of any sort. The ballot boxes were sealed before we could verify that they were not filled up before election day.“There were 45.2 million eligible voters, and 59.6 million voting slips with serial numbers were printed. A day before the elections, there were millions more printed without serial numbers. The fact that there were so many extra voting slips itself is questionable. There is no way we could have run out of voting slips so early into the elections.”The next step is the Guardian Council’s.
A relative of mine recently posted this petition. It calls for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the crimes committed by Ali Khamenei. It also calls for a warrant for Khamenei’s arrest, similar to the one recently issued for the arrest of Omar Bashir in Sudan.
In full, the petition reads:
Dear Madams/Sirs, Prosecutors of the International Court of Justice,
Based on the constitution of the Islamic regime ruling Iran, Ali Khamenei, the leader designated as The Absolute Theocratic Guardianship, has unlimited authority, his commands must be unconditionally enforced and he cannot be challenged or opposed in any way. As such, Ali Khamenei acts in nothing more than in his own self-interest, in dereliction of his duty to safeguarding the lives, property and dignity of the people of Iran and maniacally runs rough shod over our nation; and with the aid of his oppressive henchmen, they add to the multitudes of the tortured and murdered of this land. This is a dictator whose inept and brutal policies has stiffled any expression of dissent and has squarely put our country in the path of destruction.
This suffocation and continued injustice has drowned out the voices of protesting groups such as the legions of workers, teachers, students, writers, journalists, bloggers, etc. Each day the number of the executed and tortured, in the prisons increases, all simply as a result of differences of opinion or opposition to the regime�s course of action.
As a result, in view of the recent warrant issued by your court, in the case of Omar al-Bashir, the criminal leader of The Sudan, we the below signatories, call upon you to also investigate crimes committed by Ali Khamenei, and to also issue a warrant for his arrest.
Moussavi’s open letter to the people of Iran. Released tonight at 9:21pm. It states that he stands with the people to protect the original aims of the revolution to reach human rights and democracy. He states that what they got instead was fraud, injustice, torture and lies. He states why he will not stand down and why all the security forces of Iran are brothers and sisters that should support the nation. He says the body charged with investigating the elections is not a neutral body. He calls on authorities to pull the security forces and Basij out of the streets and allow the people’s voices to be heard peacefully. The full letter in Farsi can be found here.
We are gathering in the memory of our brothers and sisters killed in the recent protests in Iran.
Time: Monday 22 June 9-10PM. ****NOTE THE TIME CHANAGE****
Place: The pedestrian bridge side by side the Lamar bridge on Town Lake. The bridge is between Riverside Dr and 1st St. Map
Please respect the following requests:
1. Please wear dark shirts
2. Do not bring any signs (this is a silent protest)
3. Please bring your own candles
4. Do not bring any flags
5. Be there on time (take into account that parking is not easy!)
Here is the Facebook event:
http://www.facebook.com/events.php?ref=sb#/event.php?eid=94690388547
Hope to see you all there!
More News coverage:
“Iran’s Political Crisis Fuels Expatriates’ Fears, Hopes” – Wall Street Journal
Austin American-Statesman Pictures
Public Radio International’s “To The Point” interviews a member of IPJ.
“Iranians in US watch presidential election” – PRI’s The World
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If you took pictures and are willing to share them, please email it to persiancowboy@gmail.com
Picture Gallery by Pouya R
Picture Gallery by Betsy GM
Diary of a Defiance:
Iran un-Interrupted
By Hamid Dabashi
15 June 2009
With the semi-spontaneous demonstration in Tehran and other major cities (including Shiraz, where we have had eyewitness accounts by members of my family), the civil unrest that began on 13 June with opposition to the announced results of the presidential election of 12 June has entered a new phase. The assumption of the election having been rigged is now a “social fact.” It is no longer relevant if the election was or was not rigged. Millions of Iranians believe it was and they are putting their lives on the line to announce and assert it—with at least 12 fatalities, as just reported by The Guardian.
We need to have a careful and accurate summation of what has happened so far. On 12 June upward of 80% of eligible voters, about 40 out of 46 million, have voted. This has been the most magnificent manifestation of the political maturity of Iran as a nation and their collective democratic will. This nation does not need, nor has it ever needed, either a medieval concoction called the Vali Faqih in Qom or Tehran to patronize it or else a Neocon chicanery called “Iran Democracy Project” in Hoover Institution in California to promote it. This nation, as always, can take care of itself. It needs nothing but the active solidarity of ordinary people around the globe to be a witness to their struggles and demand from their media an accurate and comprehensive representation of their movement. So please, hands off Iran! No “democracy project,” no sanction, no threat, no military attack, no regime change.
The day after the results were announced, on 13 June, there was a spontaneous demonstration in Tehran by supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi demanding recount and charging vote rigging. The following day, on 14 June, the government staged a major pro-Ahmadinejad rally in which his supporters were bussed in from surrounding villages. It is important to keep in mind that Ahmadinejad’s supporters come from the poorest and most disenfranchised segments of Iranian society, subject to his and his campaign’s populism and demagoguery. From this fact one should not conclude that all the impoverished segments of Iranian society, suffering from double digit inflation and endemic unemployment, are on his side or fooled by his charlatanism. The supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the Reformist movement come from a vast trajectory of Iranian society.
Today, on 15 June 2009, the uprising has assumed an entirely different dimension and may have already transmuted into a full-fledged civil disobedience movement, with hundreds of thousands (according to BBC, which is usually quite conservative in its estimations), demonstrating peacefully and joyously between Meydan-e Enqelab and Meydan-e Azadi. Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami have led the demonstration and made speeches, as has Zahra Rahnavard, now an inspiration and role model for millions of Iranian women. Please take a good look at her and keep a print of her picture and the picture of other women participating in these demonstrations in your files before some other charlatan comes and crops it for the cover of the next edition of Reading Lolita in Tehran, or else puts together a collage of it for yet another book on “Sexual Revolution” or “Sexual Politics” in Iran. Whoever has won this particular presidential election, lipstick jihadis, career opportunist memoirists, obscene and fraudulent anthropologists on a summer “field work” in Iran, useless expatriate “opposition,” and comprador intellectuals in general are among its main losers.
What we are witnessing today may indeed be the commencement of a full-fledged civil disobedience, led by an aging revolutionary, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, battle-tested, literally, during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), a war hero to his followers, and then gone into seclusion for almost 20 years (reading, writing, teaching, and painting), and has now come back with a vengeance against the opportunist populism of Ahmadinejad. The movement that he has led has been fortunately peaceful so far, except for at least 12 reported fatalities, perhaps more. Demonstrators have been savagely beaten up both in streets and in student dormitories. But by and large this civil disobedience has been relatively peaceful.
Tomorrow we need to see how the dialectic among three forces will unfold: (1) a mass cross-section of society supporting Mir Hossein Mousavi and demanding at the very least a recount of the rigged votes; (2) the leadership of this movement by Mousavi, Karrubi, and Khatami, and the Reformists in general; and (3) opposing them are the brutal and vicious charlatanism of Ahmadinejad, the autumn of the Vali Faqih’s patriarchy initially supporting him, and the platoon of conservative clergy like Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi in Qom.
Mir-Hossein Mousavi has the make up of an Iranian Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. in him. We have to wait and see.
Hamid Dabashi
New York
15 June 2009
Having just participated in a historic election, millions of Iranians in Iran and around the world are baffled, angry, and heartbroken with the official results of the presidential campaign of 22 Khordad 1388 (12 June 2009). There are perfectly legitimate reasons to question the validity of the official results that have declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the clear winner of this election. The campaign headquarters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karrubi have openly and emphatically questioned the validity of this result and pointed to myriads of irregularities. The office of Mohsen Reza’i, the other candidate, has equally challenged the result but reserved specific comments until later. Video clips coming out of Iran show that thousands of Iranian voters have poured into streets of their capital questioning the validity of this result, facing brutal suppression of their legitimate and legal protests. The only thing of which Iranians can be sure and proud is the extraordinary manifestation of their collective will to participate in a massive democratic process. This unprecedented participation neither lends legitimacy to the illegitimate apparatus of the Islamic Republic and its manifestly undemocratic organs nor should it be abused by bankrupt oppositional forces outside Iran to denounce and denigrate a glorious page in modern Iranian history. Iranians were right to participate in a monumental manifestation of their collective democratic will, which lends legitimacy to nothing other than their political participation, as it is the indication of nothing other than their democratic maturity. Whoever the legitimate winner of this election might be, and we may never get to know that fact, the real winners are Iranian people—and no future president of Iran, legitimate or illegitimate in occupying that office, can ever forget or disregard this collective democratic will. This is a cathartic moment in modern Iranian history, which requires collective intelligence, political vigilance, and steadfast diligence as to how to interpret it and move forward. The beleaguered custodians of the Islamic Republic want to abuse this massive participation as a vindication of their rule. It is not. Bankrupt oppositional forces outside Iran, entirely alien to the democratic aspirations of Iranian people, wish to abuse it to legitimize their retarded positions. They are equally wrong. We need to keep our eyes on the precious ball of a democratic process that has been achieved and handed to us at great cost by generations of sacrifices. Take a picture of that inky finger with which you voted on 12th June 2009 and keep it for the posterity. You did the right thing at the right moment, and your children will frame that picture for generation to come.
Hamid Dabashi
New York, 13 June 2009
From NIAC:
According to phone reports from inside Iran, there are rumors that Mousavi is under house arrest. Also, Mohsen Mirdamadi, the head of the Islamic Iran Participation Front has reportedly been arrested.
About 200 police forces have surrounded the newspaper offices of Etemademelli and Green Word, holding at least 30 journalist inside. The fate of the journalists is not known. According to Mousavi’s website: On Friday evening Iran time, and in the middle of live internet coverage by Mowj-e Sevom (Third Wave), several officers without uniform and without a warrant attacked the office of Mowj-e Sevom in Gheytariyeh, Tehran and threatened the journalists and others who were there for interviews, beating them up and using tear gas. Protests are continuing in Valiasr, Tajrish and Vanak streets.
There are rumors that four people have been killed so far. This has not been confirmed.
Juan Cole has posted several important 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.
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.