Iran's President Says Election Will Not Be Fair
7 Feb 2004
Radio Free Europe
Tehran, 7 February 2004 (RFE/RL) -- Iran's President Mohammad Khatami says legislative elections due in two weeks' time will not be fair because of a conservative oversight body's decision to bar more than 2,000 candidates.
Iran's official IRNA news agency says Khatami and parliament speaker Mehdi Karrubi have sent a joint letter to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to complain about the conservative Guardians Council's continuing disqualification of the candidates.
As a result, say Khatami and Karrubi in their letter, Iran's voters will have little motivation to come to the polls and will not have a chance to participate in a fair ballot.
But Khatami and Karrubi stopped short of calling for a postponement of the 20 February poll.
Iran's largest reformist party, headed by Khatami's brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, has said it will boycott the election.
http://www.rferl.org/features/features_article.aspx?id=906ffc08-a9cc-4d0f-9714-1f6da1516e9f&y=2004&m=02What will the peope do? If it were me, I'd be organizing another election, running whoever wants to run, having a HUGE turnout and let the mad mullahs try to explain away why the official elections only had a 1% turnout and the unofficial elections had 70% turnout.
The Iranian people need to take back their country, but they can only do it by taking a united stand.