Letters to the Editor

• Increasingly clear? More like increasingly LOUD but muddy.

  [Read the article: Letter from Tehran: The day after]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  It's becoming increasingly clear that this was a palace coup, a palace coup in the style of Peru's Fujimori.

  Actually, the closer one looks, the less clear that appears to be.

  First, Robert Fisk in The Independent*, in an article where it is abundantly clear that he is no fan of Ahmadinejad and is quite sympathetic to the protesters includes this:

  An interval here for lunch with a true and faithful friend of the Islamic Republic, a man I have known for many years who has risked his life and been imprisoned for Iran and who has never lied to me. We dined in an all-Iranian-food restaurant, along with his wife. He has often criticised the regime. A man unafraid. But I must repeat what he said. "The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad."
  
  

  My guest and I drank dookh, the cool Iranian drinking yoghurt so popular here. The streets of Tehran were a thousand miles away. "You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."

  There is also a poll being reported by MRzine* which supposedly was commissioned and conducted by the New America Foundation, Terror Free Tomorrow and KA Europe which shows that, at least at the time of the poll, Ahmadinejad was leading and favored to win:

  In a new public opinion poll across Iran before the critical upcoming June 12, 2009 Presidential elections, a plurality of Iranians said they would vote for incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. . . . Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, polls in Iran are either conducted or monitored by the Iranian government and other affiliated interest groups, and can be untrustworthy. By contrast, our poll -- the third in a series over the past two years -- was conducted by telephone inside Iran over May 11th to 20th, 2009, with 1,001 interviews proportionally distributed covering all 30 provinces of Iran, with a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent. Full survey results and methodology follow.

  And finally, this article/commentary by Abbas Barzegar* in The Guardian which provides several observations and points which may be worthy of consideration:

  Since I arrived, few here doubted that the incumbent firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad would win. My airport cab driver reminded me that the president had visited every province twice in the last four years – "Iran isn't Tehran," he said. . . . (T)he rather real possibility of voter fraud exists and one must wait in the coming weeks to see how these allegations unfold. But one should recall that in three decades of presidential elections, the accusations of rigging have rarely been levied against the vote count. Elections here are typically controlled by banning candidates from the start or closing opposition newspapers in advance.

  ...

  As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting. It is true that Mousavi supporters jammed Tehran traffic for hours every night over the last week, though it was rarely mentioned that they did so only in the northern well-to-do neighborhoods of the capital.

  ...

  (T)he failure to properly gauge Iran's affairs is hardly a new phenomenon. When the 1979 revolution shattered the military dictatorship of America's strongest ally in the region few experts outside of the country suspected that the Islamic current would emerge as the leading party. . . .Since the revolution, academics, intellectuals and pundits have predicted the imminent collapse of the regime. As of today, they have done no better.

  I am not about to say that there wasn't fraud in the Iranian elections. But by the same token I am not about to join in with the echo chamber which fervently wished for a far different result and which now seems hell bent on charging fraud with no real sound basis. I'll wait and see how it plays out and listen to all sides before reaching any firm conclusions. My advice, unasked for though it is, is for others to do the same.

  *Links to quoted articles:

  Robert Fisk in TheIndpendent.co.uk at http://bit.ly/159NLn

  Public opinion poll in MRzine at http://bit.ly/t7M5N

  Comment/article by Abas Barzegar in The Guardian.co.uk: http://bit.ly/19mKoo

  Permalink Sunday, June 14, 2009 04:27 PM