Iranian Islamists Try To Derail Elections By Andrew L. Jaffee, January 12, 2004	Home   Search   Forum   Terms

Iran's Council of Guardians has banned hundreds of reform-minded candidates from running in elections scheduled for next month. The Council is made up of hard-line Islamists, and has the authority to overrule actions of the elected portions of Iran's complex government system. In protest of the Council's undemocratic moves, 70 members of the Majlis (parliament) are holding a sit-in. Iran's 27 provincial governors are also protesting the Council's actions. All 27 are threatening to resign if the Guardians don't reverse their decision to block candidates. Iran's Interior Ministry has called the Council's action illegal.

According to the BBC,

Council spokesman Mohammad Jahromi said 2,033 of the 8,200 candidates had been barred but MPs [Members of Parliament] said the figure was higher.

MP Reza Yousefian said more than 80 of 290 MPs had been banned from re-election.

Iran's parliament is dominated by the reformists who have won all major national elections since 1997.

Current Iranian President Khatami was elected President six years ago. He promised "reform," but many Iranians have become fed up with the slow/nonexistent implementation of political changes. Iranians have since held many public demonstrations demanding democratic reform. Most often, the religious conservatives in government, like the Guardians, have responded with violence or by suppressing information they don't like to hear.

The Council's attempts to rig elections is certainly a political crisis. One may wonder how candidates up for election can be prevented from running. Sounds pretty undemocratic. It can be very difficult to understand the machinations of Iranian politics because of the way government there is set up.

While reading this article, you may want to click here to see a chart explaining Iran's political setup. Iran has two main branches of government: one is elected; the other is not. The people elect the President, the Majlis, and the Assembly of Experts. The Supreme Leader, the armed forces, the judiciary, the Expediency Council, and the Council of Guardians are basically just there -- in other words, they're not elected. Herein lays the problem.

The unelected portion of Iran's government has final say over everything. They have allowed the Majlis and President to exist as a safety valve. These religious fanatics believe they can pacify their own people by allowing them to have token elections and pseudo-democratic institutions. How condescending they are. The Iranian people are proud and intelligent. They have a long and noble history. Iranians know nonsense when they see it. If Iranians believed in their fanatical "leaders," then why have so many risked their lives in protest against that leadership?

But Iran's unelected leadership won't just go away. They, as all dictators do, will cling to power. Iranians should look to the fall of the Soviet Union as a model for toppling dictatorship and birthing democracy. The Eastern Europeans threw out their Soviet oppressors in a "Velvet Revolution," named so because it was largely peaceful. For example, on August 23, 1989, more then one million Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians protested Soviet occupation by holding hands and forming a "human chain" that spanned 476 miles across the three Baltic countries.

I have to believe that if enough Iranians participated in sit-ins, work slow-downs, general strikes, mass demonstrations, underground newspapers, and online opposition blogs, they could topple the Islamist leadership. But Iranians will have to act and coordinate their efforts so they can exercise true people-power. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, but Iranians can be free and soon.

For those of us outside Iran, we can support the Iranian peoples' struggle for democracy by helping pass the Iran Democracy Act, by providing information about the situation in Iran (see Blog Iran!), and by supporting groups like the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran.