Prelude: Ukraine; Late November 2004, run-off Presidential election between Victor Yanukovych, the then Prime Minister, who secured 39.32% votes in first round, and Victor Yushchenko, the opposition candidate who got 39.87% of the votes. The third and fourth candidate received just around 5%. Orange was embraced as the signifying color by the Yushchenko's camp. After the second round of voting, Yanukovych was leading with 49.2% votes with Yushchenko at 46.69%. Yushchenko called for civil disobedience and a massive protest was held at Independence Square (Azadi Square, anyone?). According to Times Magazine Yushchenko asked his supporters not to leave the Square till they achieve victory. The elections were all about whether the Ukraine would pursue closer ties with West or stick closer to Russia. The Guardian reported on November 24th 2004: "The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department, and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns, as are the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute". The same daily observed about a year later on Oct 14, 2005: "The winning coalition that orchestrated last winter's street protests collapsed in disarray last month. Leading members accused each other of corruption... Far from being motivated by a genuine wish to promote democracy, many leading Yushchenko-backers only wanted to grab a greater share of the post-Soviet pie". That was the sad ending of a US orchestrated and much cheered Orange Revolution. Similar revolutions were fomented elsewhere in the region including Pink Revolution (Kyrgystan) and Rose Revolution (Georgia). The same American billionaire, George Soros, spent $42 million to overthrow Shevardnadze in the later one.
It was February 2006, when Dr. Condoleezza Rice requested Congress to increase the funds to promote "Democracy" and for "Change in regime behavior" in Iran. Rice requested $75 million for the purpose. One of the figures who helped launch this program was Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs. The state department officials at that time talked of a desire to stir up internal forces for massive political change, as done in Ukraine and Georgia. But they refused to disclose the specific details to protect the identity of Iranian individuals and organizations that had received funding. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Laureate for Peace, wrote in an article published in International Herald Tribune on May 30, 2007:
The secret dimension of the distribution of the $75 million has also created immense problems for Iranian reformists, democratic groups and human rights activists. Aware of their own deep unpopularity, the hard-liners in Iran are terrified by the prospects of a 'velvet revolution' and have become obsessed with preventing contacts between Iranian scholars, artists, journalists and political activists and their American counterparts.
To gauge the depth of these clandestine operations, I refer to a report that appeared on Asia Times Online back in Mar 14, 2006, titled as "Inside the US's regime-change school". The report detailed on how an Iranian lady named Nilofar, working for an International organization in Tehran suddenly got an invitation to attend Human Rights workshop in Dubai. When she went over there she came to know that the conference was falsely advertised in the lobby of the hotel as the conference by the "Griffin Hospital". The participants were identifying themselves only through aliases. The course organizers were LA based exiled Iranians and Americans plus three Serbs belonging to the Otpor movement that overthrew the President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. The workshop stressed the importance of ridiculing the political elite so as to demystify the aura of sacredness surrounding them and employing different methods to bring down the government. That crash course for changing a regime was held several months before the Bush administration requested the extra funding to accelerate the purpose. So for all practical purposes they had a lead time of three full years for breeding and training the required herd of color revolutionists.
Then came the 10th Iranian Presidential Election. The main contestants were Mahmood Ahmadinejad and Mir Hossein Mousavi. During the last run-off presidential elections Ahmadinejad defeated Hashemi Rafsanjani by getting 17.28 million votes as compared to just above 10 million of the opponent with 48% turnout, given it was the second round. Many were perplexed by the defeat of a person of such a stature as Rafsanjani was. But the general perception of wealth mingled with corruption and his luxurious and lavish lifestyle as compared to austere of Ahmadinejad with full backing of religious clerics and his reputation as a hard working mayor of Tehran made the setback simple enough. There were rumors circulating widely involving his family members in corruption, kickbacks, and embezzlement. During the live broadcast of the presidential debate on 3rd June, Ahmadinejad hit the nerve directly by exposing Rafsanjani's role behind the Mousavi campaign. Though it was already known among the political and media circles that it was Hashemi who was the main backer of Mir Housein Mousavi (as evident from the article of 18 June by David Blair in "Telegraph"), but it struck the masses like a revelation. Rafsanjani had become a kind of bête noire for the majority of the Iranian public since the last election. Those accusations worked as a catalyst for the massive turnout in the election. The only independent opinion poll conducted by "Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion" and "New America Foundation" gave Ahmadinejad a lead of 2 to 1.
If you compare the election results with the poll results you will find out that they are just mirror images of each other though polls predicted a bit more votes for Ahmadinejad.
Here the points raised in Joshua Muravchik article in New York Post on demand some scrutiny as he called the referred poll as "Junk Poll". The article opened up with these comments:
No sooner had the first truncheon fallen on the head of an Iranian protester demanding that votes be fairly counted than two researchers from American advocacy groups rushed into print to vouch for the legitimacy of the official outcome of Iran's presidential election.
This implies that the report came in aftermath of protests which is not the case. The report appeared on the websites of different news channels much before the election. Like the VOA reported the results of this survey on 8th June in an article of Meredith Buel.
I will come to the technical points later but to reveal the credibility of his analysis will start from the end of the article where he claimed that "Oh, and the alleged tally of 10 million paper ballots was announced just three hours after polls closed, a feat that could only have been managed one way -- by counting the votes before they were cast." There were a total of 45,713 ballot boxes set up all across Iran and total of 39.2 million votes being casted. If you divide those 10 million votes to 45 thousand ballot boxes you got an average of around 220 votes per box. Even if you take a minute to count a single vote, 3 hours are more than enough, in order of magnitude, to count those 10 million votes. And if there are more than 4 persons counting the votes the whole lot can be counted within the span of same time, leave the 10 million. By the way counting a single vote doesn't take more than 10-15 seconds. As far as communication of the result to regional offices are concerned we can safely presume that when all the opposition was tweeting and posting on Facebook, the election results were not being communicated through Pigeon-Post. Now building on the same argument I would like to quote what Time Magazine had reported on the same issue:
"Friday's announcement, which was based on a very small count, came just minutes after Mousavi declared himself to be "definitely the winner." According to a Mousavi official in Paris, the opposition leader was initially informed by the Interior Ministry that he had won."
If partial announcement of the counts was not possible, which I have proven is not the case, how come Mousavi announcement of his success is possible even before that and from the same Interior Ministry. Why nobody said that it was Mousavi who want to rig the results in his favor by such an early claim of victory quoting unknown officials. A double standard indeed! If count was not possible then it was not for all the candidates and not for Ahmadinejad only. I would like to add one more fact here. It's the same arch-conservative Interior ministry who declared Muhammad Khatami, a more popular and liberal, winner in the past, not once but twice. And Khatami didn't have the stigma of working as a Prime Minster under the more radical leadership of Imam Khomeini, what Mousavi had from the perspective from liberal camp. Here if we check the results of that 1997 and 2001 elections, we would found the Khatami won with even higher percentage of lead i.e. 70% and 78% respectively and at both time the turnout was over 80%.
It would be of interest if I quote here what Muhammad Khatami said after winning the second consecutive elections: "Every ballot in the box is a vote for an Islamic system of government here". Someone was saying that the larger turnout is for change but if the rhetoric is true why there was such a higher turnout in the second term of Khatami. No! Its about popularity as well. And it is almost same the case with the elections in 2005 when Ahmadinejad gave the surprise with winning the elections against a most powerful candidate, Hashemi Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad got more than 17 million votes though voter turnout was just 48% compared to 85% this time. It make the lead in this term more realistic and sync with previous results. It is the reason that John Stremalu, Vice President for Peace Programs at the Carter Center, admitted that fast announcement is not necessarily proof of rigging. The guy has monitored 75 elections over the past two decades. And keep in mind that Iran does not have any history of rigged elections since revolution.
Mr. Muravchik further stated that:
"Mir Hussein Mousavi's campaign rallies were larger than Ahmadinejad's, although the latter had state resources. Voter turnout, all sides agree, was 35 percent higher than last time:"
Yes of course, if media and no other than BBC, show images of rally in support of Ahmadinejad and passes it off as Pro-Mousavi, such perceptions are not entirely incorrect. Other than that there is no evidence for such claims. Both sides came out with good rallies and there are no parameters available to judge which ones were bigger. If all sides agree that voter turnout was 35% higher, this proves that no fake voting was being done to increase the turn out. People actually voted for one candidate or other. Now I revert to his main argument:
It turns out that their callers reached 1,731 people. Fully 730 refused to speak to them. Of the remaining 1,001, half (501) either refused to say how they'd vote or said they didn't know or had no preference.
Now again the great scholar implies that the ratio of refusal to engage in that particular telephonic political survey is dramatically low and inferior. Not at all! On the other hand it's on the max side (Lisa Harrison- Political Research: An Introduction), i.e. a good 58% while in US the telephone response rate stands merely at '30%'. The second point is the issue of what we call Spiral of Silence. But before discussing the issue further I would like to point out a fact missed by Mr. Muravchik. In his article somewhere he referred to the Freedom House Rating on Iran which according to him is placed among the two dozen least free countries in the world (Again a false analysis though as Belarus, Burma, Chad, China, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe were even worst). The interesting part with this Freedom House rating is that in 2008 they showed Afghanistan, a country under occupation, and Kashmir, a area occupied by India, as partially free including Yemen, Somalia, Turkey, Jordan and Ethiopia fallen into same category while Iran and Pakistan were not free at all. Amazing, isn't it? Even this so called "Freedom House" declared in his rating that Iran scored the best in Freedom of Expression and Individual Rights. Now if we go back to the original argument of Mr. Muravchik where he jumbled up the ones who were not decided (27.4%) with ones who refused to answer (Just 15%) we will find out that even if we put all the 'refused to answer' votes in the basket of Mr. Mousavi, as they are the ones most expected to go for Mousavi (though Mousavi campaign was more vocal and daring as compared to Ahmadinejad and there was not even a single case reported on any sort of arrest of common Mousavi supporter before election) and the remaining undecided votes equally divided between two (to give them even chances) Ahmadinejad could have won simple majority. I admit that my putting all the "refused to answer" votes in favor of Mousavi is too generous and not appropriate as per statistical calculations but it is just to show the weakness and hollowness of others argument, I went that far. When confronted with the fact if these were the voters who were afraid of the consequences of expressing their true opinion (Mr. Muravchik read it Mousavi supporter) why they expressed heterodox views on other questions, the Scholar reply was that "many dictatorships allow some diversity of expression regarding abstract issues".
Abstract issues? Is he telling us that the question "I am going to read you a list of three options for governing Iran. Please tell me whether you support or oppose a political system where the "Supreme Leader", along with all leaders, can be chosen and replaced by a free and direct vote of the people" is just an abstract one and the good 66% support in reply is not a daring one then I would like to ask what else is the core issue of democracy in Iran. He may reply "Mousavi" and I have to accept his right of self expression. I don't think much left about his article but still want to explain few more things. First of all the elections results in 2009 elections were not just mirror image of TFT polls but also reflect the result pattern of 2005 election results when Ahmadinejad garnered 61% votes. The higher voter turnout was not because of a desire of change but because of media frenzy and subsequent polarization of the society after the live televised debate between the two competitors. If the TFT polls were not statistically correct they wouldn't match with the demographic patterns of Iran as established by the census and other official data and last but not the least with the poll results.
The turnout was overwhelming on 12th June, a massive 85%. But the designs of color revolutionists were bit different. They were planning for a run-off and propagating vehemently that higher turnout will drag the elections into the second round. The second round was necessary for their dreams to become true. Their Green would fall into the footprints of Orange revolution of Ukraine. During an e-mail interview with Washington Post, on the Election Day, Mohamad Bazzi, adjunct Senior Fellow at Council on Foreign Relations had this to say:
Mousavi does have a chance to capture 50 percent of today's vote and to avoid a runoff, but that is unlikely. The more likely scenario is for a runoff between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad.
The propaganda was so vehement that when I talked to one insider before the election, he offered the same forecast: a run-off. Even the TFT report was predicting same without giving any analytical reason for that (keeping in mind that report predicted the same higher turnout). Considering the social and economic breakdown of the population and the effective exposé of Rafsanjani's role behind the Mousavi camp, I rather thought the success of Ahmadinejad was ensured. The western media either missed the strength and impact of the personal attack on Rafsanjani-Mousavi or ignored it deliberately. They focused on the important, if not all relevant facts that people were frustrated with the economic slowdown, high inflation, and unemployment rate. But then that's the case with every third world country where incumbency is a liability. From the perspective of ordinary Iranian, Iran has made enormous progress on scientific and foreign policy fronts. There might have been a chance for Mousavi had Rafsanjani's presence not been felt as strongly. Mousavi was claiming victory before the polls were even closed. (Precisely what western commentators then accused Ahmadinejad of, as a sure sign of rigged elections.)
There were no allegations of any sort of rigging that whole day-until the noise and crying-foul suddenly started pouring out when Interior ministry announced partial results,. For a day or two we were just hearing about voting irregularities, followed by reports on the color revolution on the streets of northern Tehran. That was a coup d'état by the elite and bourgeois with green flags in their hands. The green color has special symbolic value in Iran as it is the color reserved for the progeny of the last Holy Prophet. But that movement was doomed to failure. There is no example in history of any mass revolution by the upper class. The media tried to make an issue out of the murder of Neda Sultan, but there is no evidence available to incriminate Basij in the incident. Dr. Hejazi, the music teacher present on the spot, and eyewitnesses of the incident didn't see anyone killing her. Nobody else saw any Basij firing on her.
Still, the media trial judged it otherwise. Parallels to the murder of murder of investigative journalist Georgy Gongadze, which triggered the Orange revolution in Ukraine, are inevitable. The Revolutionary Guards (RG) was expecting such nefarious designs. Just a day before the election the political chief of RG, Yadollah Javani, warned that any attempts for a velvet revolution would be nipped in the bud. Despite that, the clerical establishment allowed the protests initially. Quickly these turned into arson and property destruction. The RG then clamped down on the violent protests which diverted the efforts of color revolutionists towards the "twitter revolution", spreading (mis-)information through cyberspace. One of these evidently untrue rumors thus spread was that the president of the Election Monitoring Committee declared the election result invalid. It was in fact Ali Akbar Mohtashami, a campaigner for Mousavi, who had done so. There were many twitters from Israel too, getting in on the propaganda against the Ahmadinejad regime.
There might have been irregularities at a few polling booths or, later, at some protest sites. But the media was projecting it as a mass revolution. That, it was not. The Friday sermon by the Imam Khamenei, on June 19th, exposed the foreign hands behind the protest. He asked a simple question. How can one rig more than 10 million votes in such a situation with huge presence of International media and with no such complaint from the competitor whole election-day? He urged the Iranian nation to grasp the real motivation behind the chaos and requested restraint from both sides. And it was tense but peaceful on the coming Sunday when in spite of the appeal made by Mousavi, no major demonstration took place in Tehran. But the real revelation surfaced when no other than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confessed that US did a lot "behind the scenes" to show support for the demonstrators. Her words in fact reveal much more than they hide:
And we knew that if we stepped in too soon, too hard... the leadership would try to use us to unify the country against the protestors.
Rafsanjani, Mousavi, and Karoubi didn't show up at the sermon which is a vital indication of their future course of action. The pundits who were predicting-or rather wishing-that the Assembly of Experts, headed by Rafsanjani, would initiate any action against Imam Khamenei don't seem to be familiar with the concept of Imamate in the Shiite doctrine. Rafsanjani can not dare to challenge Supreme Leader so openly. Aside, this election was (and remains) more about Ahmadinejad vs. Rafsanjani then Khamenei vs. Rafsanjani. (Mousavi, in any case, is a puppet.) The advent of the Ahmadinejad phenomenon can be seen in the context of Islamic history as the Caliphate of Ali and the subsequent trouble from the same bourgeois class like Muawiah, Talha and Zubair. But at least for few coming years I do not foresee any major political turmoil in Iran. By siding with Mousavi, Hashemi lost any chances of becoming future Supreme Leader of Iran, if he had any.
I am former Head of Current Affairs for News One, Satellite Channel operating from Pakistan. My primary interest is in International Politics and Comparative religion. I closely follow regional developments with respect to India-Pakistan-Iran and Afghanistan in relation to US-China and Russia.