Dubious poll has dashed hopes for reform in Iran
The Age
Monday June 15, 2009
Ahmadinejad's win makes Western diplomacy more difficult. THERE is one thing worse than the re-election of a paranoid, belligerent, Holocaust-denying xenophobe as President of Iran. It is the re-election of a paranoid, belligerent, Holocaust-denying xenophobe in a poll tainted by allegations of widespread ballot-rigging. The doubt cast on the legitimacy of this election means that the hardline Government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will now have even more incentive to act repressively, lest the evident discontent at the poll result develop into an open challenge to the Government's authority.Mr Ahmadinejad has been officially declared the victor in the election with 63 per cent of the vote - far ahead of his reformist rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was credited with 34 per cent. The tallies of Mr Ahmadinejad's other rivals, Mohsen Rezai and Mehdi Karroubi, barely registered as blips on the electoral radar, and the President's apparent landslide win has made unnecessary a run-off election, which had been the most widely expected outcome after Mr Mousavi's strong performance in opinion polls in the past fortnight.It is clear that the trend in those polls severely rattled the President and his supporters. The election result may reflect the preference of a majority of Iran's voters, but the problem is that this cannot be known. Not only were there no independent international monitors of the balloting, but the final count was held behind closed doors under the direct supervision of the Interior Minister. Scrutineers for Mr Mousavi were not admitted, and the use of many mobile polling stations - originally intended only for hospitals and military posts - has fuelled speculation about ballot tampering. Newspapers were censored and networking websites such as Facebook were blocked, as were mobile-phone text messages, which had been extensively used by the Mousavi campaign.At the very least, the gulf between opinion polls on the eve of the vote and the official result barely a day later raises questions about the integrity of the electoral process. Those questions will almost certainly go unanswered, since Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ignored a plea from Mr Mousavi to intervene in the count, and instead ordered the three defeated candidates to accept the result. Mousavi supporters took to the streets in protest, only to be driven off by riot police and militia. Mr Mousavi's whereabouts was unknown yesterday, and rumours that he had been arrested were growing.For Iranians, the election result dashes the hopes of those who had sought greater personal freedom, especially for women. Mr Mousavi's coalition of his Azeri ethnic group and the urban middle classes had no radical agenda: they did not repudiate Iran's Islamic revolution and the constitution deriving from it, nor was there any indication that a Mousavi presidency would have abandoned the nuclear program that has been a source of tension between Iran and the wider world. Mr Mousavi did, however, advocate a less confrontational stance towards the West, raising the possibility that he would have been a willing partner in the dialogue proposed by US President Barack Obama.The Obama Administration clearly would have preferred a Mousavi victory, but its response to the election has been cautious. Officially there has been only a restatement by the White House of its desire for closer diplomatic engagement of Iran; in part perhaps to avoid increasing tension on the streets there, and in part no doubt because President Obama has renounced intervention in the internal politics of other countries to obtain outcomes favourable to the US. In his speech to the Islamic world delivered in Cairo earlier this month, Mr Obama condemned the CIA's role in deposing the government of Mohamed Mossadeq in Iran in 1953. He was right to do so, but rejecting such interventionism also raises the stakes for conventional diplomacy by the US.The Obama approach may already have had some success, for the President's Cairo speech has been credited with influencing the outcome of Lebanon's election last week, in which a pro-Western Sunni and Christian coalition unexpectedly defeated the Shiite Hezbollah, supported by Iran and Syria. The fairness of Lebanon's poll has not been questioned.In the short term, the greatest uncertainty about events in Iran concerns Israel's attitude to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's continuing grip on power. The Netanyahu Government has refused to rule out military action to extinguish Iran's nuclear program, and that may now be one step closer.
© 2009 The Age
Share This