Iranians Vote in Election That May End Reform Drive
Fri February 20, 2004 06:24 AM ET
By Parinoosh Arami and Paul Taylor TEHRAN (Reuters)
Urged by prayer leaders to "slap America in the face," Iranians voted Friday in a disputed parliamentary election set to tighten hard-liners' grip on power and end President Mohammad Khatami's faltering reform drive.
A short, lackluster campaign was overshadowed by a ban on most reformist candidates and a crackdown on pro-reform media amid apparent public indifference. The main uncertainty concerns the turnout, with even the size of the electorate in dispute.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among the first to cast his ballot, said the Islamic Republic's enemies were trying to deter young people from voting -- an apparent reference to a boycott by blacklisted reformist lawmakers and student groups.
"You see how those who are against the Iranian nation and the Islamic revolution are trying so hard to prevent people from going to the polls," Khamenei told state television.
Conservatives seem certain to dominate the new assembly after the Guardian Council, an unelected panel of hard-line clerics, disqualified 2,500 mainly reformist aspirants and a further 1,179 contenders withdrew.
A gloomy-looking Khatami voted at the Interior Ministry. In an oblique criticism of an election he has branded "unfair," he told reporters: "This nation has been defeated many times but continued its path and created surprises."
State media, controlled by the conservatives, pulled out all the stops to boost the turnout and legitimise the poll, broadcasting patriotic songs and old footage of revolutionary marches and mass voting in past elections.
"TRAITORS"
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of the Guardian Council, used the main Friday prayers sermon in Tehran to attack the reformist parties and student groups shunning the poll, saying the boycott was "rooted in the palaces of America."
"Those who whisper 'don't vote' are traitors to the country and Islam," he said. Some reformists say they fear a wave of arrests after the election.
Ahmad Amjadi, 42, a government employee in the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, told Reuters: "It is our religious duty to vote."
"Iranians are united against the enemy and to slap the Americans' face, we will vote," he said, echoing the anti-U.S. rhetoric Khamenei and state media have been using.
The election could halt Khatami's frequently obstructed drive to liberalise the 25-year-old Islamic state, which has fostered lively political debate and some relaxation of strict social codes in the oil-producing nation of 66 million.
Disenchantment with his failure to achieve more during seven years in office meant many voters were likely simply to stay at home, handing victory to his conservative opponents.
"Or course I'm not going to vote and I don't think anyone else is. All of them (politicians) have only worked for themselves," said war veteran Ali Asghar, a white-haired man with shrapnel lodged in his leg.
Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, whose surprise choice as winner of the 2003 peace prize shone a spotlight on the struggle for human rights in Iran, said this week she would not vote because people were not free to choose their representatives.
Foreshadowing a dispute over the turnout, the reformist-run Interior Ministry and the Guardian Council, which has the power to validate the results, issued conflicting figures for the size of the electorate.
The ministry said 46,351,032 Iranians aged 15 and over were entitled to vote. The Council, whose 12 members are appointed directly or indirectly by Khamenei, said it was 43 million.
"The figure given by the Guardian Council on the number of voters in the country is incorrect," the Interior Ministry said.
Most analysts expect turnout to be well below the two thirds who voted in 2000 elections, when reformist allies of Khatami won. A low turnout could undermine the authority of the result.
The Guardian Council disqualified the best known reformists, including 80 sitting deputies such as the president's brother, Mohammed Reza, as un-Islamic or hostile to the constitution.
In what many reformers fear is a sign of things to come, the hard-line judiciary Thursday sealed the campaign headquarters of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, led by Khatami's brother, and blocked access to its news Web Site.
The two most outspoken reformist newspapers were closed on Wednesday for reporting an unprecedented scathing open letter to Khamenei by reformist lawmakers banned from Friday's poll.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4402091