The fact that the latest demonstrations were violently repressed and that Mir Hossein Mousavi, whose nephew was killed, declared that he is ready to die in the struggle if needed is proof that the crisis is running deep.I personally felt that the ongoing political tension in Iran was very high and the fissure created by the election held on June 12 was unexpectedly deep while at a press conference Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held in Tehran. Next to me sat an Iranian-Azerbaijani journalist who works for an international news agency. I asked him how Turkey’s Iran policy and Erdoğan’s visit were perceived in the country. I was expecting him to see the Turkish prime minister’s visit to Iran at a time when the world was trying to isolate it as done to show solidarity. But I was wrong. He said that the timing of the visit was wrong. Erdoğan’s visit lent significant support to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is believed to have cheated in the elections. Moreover, this was not only his personal view; it was the common belief of millions of Iranians who do not accept the election results and of millions of Azerbaijanis who feel affinity toward Mousavi, who was born in Tabriz.
Another striking fact was that people in Tehran willingly shared their critical views about the elections and Ahmadinejad. It seemed that people had gone beyond the threshold of fear and did not care about what might happen to themselves.
It is impossible to understand what is going on in this country if you are looking at it from the West, which has its own plans regarding the country. Still, it is equally wrong to turn a blind eye to the incidents under the false assumption that all criticisms of Iran are the product of a Western conspiracy. The best thing to do is to lend an ear to the people who have selected the green of the Iranian flag as their symbol, who rush to the streets to protest whenever they have a chance to do so, who keep protesting against the government by shouting “God is the greatest” from the roofs of their houses at night and who say they are ready to die for their cause.
In this respect, an interview published in the Doğudan journal by Cihan Aktaş, whom I see as one of the rare figures who can watch Iran from Turkey without falling prey to the West’s illusions, was very instructive and thought provoking. In the interview, journalist Zehra Nejadbehram, who was born in 1964 and has a doctorate in political science and was the first woman general director of the Tehran governor’s office’s elections department, deftly describes the place of the opposition within the system in Iran and their disappointments and demands. For her, contrary to popular belief, the fight is not between reformists and conservatives, but between those ruling elites who seek to maintain their hold on power at any cost and the people. “We, too, describe ourselves as traditionalists or conservatives,” she says.
In reality, it is hard to classify the opposition as being against the revolution. Indeed, their leader, Mousavi, served as prime minister during the heyday of the revolution (between 1981 and 1989). Moreover, Khomeini’s family supports the opposition.
Nejadbehram refuses to be depicted as being pro-West: “When I was 14, we would climb to the roof and shout, ‘God is the greatest.’ We would rush to the streets, and then we would be beaten. With these God-is-the-greatests, we carried out the revolution. Now, with the same God-is-the-greatests, we ask, ‘Where have our votes gone?’ Why won’t anyone answer? We do not want the foreigners to come. We just want a committee of our scholars [ulama], mullas and taqlid authorities to be established.”
Noting that not a single scholar from Qom congratulated Ahmadinejad, Nejadbehram lists the events that add credence to suspicions of election irregularities: that the pro-government Keyhan newspaper’s official Web site announced that Ahmadinejad was elected president with 24 million votes at 10 p.m., before the vote counting started; that this post was removed from the Web site when BBC ran a news story about it; that the numbers did not change after the first announcement of the results; and that cell phone services, including text messaging, stopped working one day before the election despite the Interior Ministry promising that it would not happen.
The children of the revolution say they “don’t want another revolution; they only want to know where the 20 million votes cast in an election with an 85 percent participation rate have gone.” The fate of the regime, currently wrestling with the nuclear crisis and economic hardships, will be determined by the answer the children of the revolution are given to this question.
