IDEAS

I am an Iranian citizen and I did not participate in the fraudulent June 12th presidential elections in Iran.

This is the awkward position I find myself in now, having spent nearly three  weeks watching millions protest the results of that election in the streets of Iran and around the world.  This is the awkward position I find myself in, surrounded by a sea of protesters demanding “Where is my Vote?” at the solidarity rallies I’ve been attending in the city where I live.  This is the decision I am reminded of every day, as I sift through the seemingly endless stream of information being disseminated on the mainstream news, YouTube, Facebook, and the blogosphere for hours every day.  This is the decision I am reminded of as I try to find my way in the world of citizen journalism, sharing news from Iran, translating videos and breaking news, and exposing the lies of Iranian state media.

This is the decision I am reminded of as I write this now, in solidarity with the millions of Iranians who, unlike me, chose to believe in the democratic promise of the Islamic Republic by casting their vote for change on June 12th 2009: the millions of Iranians who watched that vote get stolen from them and are now demanding it back.

Like most of my Iranian friends and family in the diaspora, I had never voted in any Iranian election. But this year was different. There was a sense of urgency among my friends both in and out of Iran, a passion forcefully expressed each time we--secular, democracy-seeking Iranians—would debate that eternal moral and political question: to vote or not to vote? To try to bring about change, like Shirin Ebadi, by working within the system; or to refuse to participate in—and thus legitimate—a system we believe is fundamentally flawed.

In my case, after long reflection, I decided that I could not vote for a candidate of convenience in whom I only half-heartedly believe to head a government in which I don’t believe at all.  As someone who has never spent more than three straight months of her adult life in Iran, and who has little in common with the “average” Iranian voter--largely because I don’t believe that religious doctrine (and certainly not strict interpretations of Islamic law) should have any place in the state—I simply didn't think it was my place to vote in this election.

When news came of Ahmadinejad's landslide "victory," I wasn't shocked. On one hand, I told myself, Ahmadinejad is a populist whose base is comprised of the devout and underprivileged masses from whom I have always been insulated, whom I have never gotten to know in the "real world" outside my family’s north Tehran cocoon. I had assumed that the green wave movement was restricted to people like myself: Iran's urban elite, the diaspora, and the remaining 20% of the middle-class population with internet access. In that case, Ahmadinejad's supposed 63% margin didn’t seem at all  improbable.

Then, when the many irregularities became public and it began to become clear that the election had been rigged in some way, I wasn't surprised either.  After all, I never believed we were dealing with a transparent and democratic system to begin with.  While I was puzzled by the clumsy way in which the whole deception had been pulled off (the announcement of results before the polls had closed, Mousavi’s failure to procure a majority of votes in his home town, etc.), the fact that a fraud had taken place in the first place did not faze me.  Given the zero-sum game the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has been playing for some time now, it seems perfectly plausible that he would want to make it look like Ahmadinejad has a popular mandate to continue doing his bidding.  

No one knows what the real numbers would have been; maybe Mousavi won; maybe Ahmadinejad did; or maybe a second-round run-off between the two would have been necessary. But ultimately this fraud just served to reinforce my cynical view of the fundamental problem Iranians face: when you're dealing with a theocratic dictatorship, voting is meaningful only to the extent that the clerical powers that be—and the Supreme Leader in particular—are willing to respect the popular will.  In this case, they are not.

Having said all this, I must admit that if the opposition had succeeded in forcing Khamenei to annul this election and to hold a new one in the presence of international monitors, I would have voted without hesitation. Not because I believe in the system, and not because I believe in any of the establishment leaders out there (Mousavi, Khatami, Rafsanjani, even Montazeri), but because I think it's important to show solidarity with the Iranian people and to expose the system for being the fraud it is.  

I think Iranians are so outraged right now because they’re seeing that the system, in its current form, DOESN'T work, that it is run by people who shamelessly rig elections with completely made-up numbers.  I think people are beginning to see through the "republican" facade of this theocracy, whose continued existence depends on so much indoctrination, misinformation, and fraud.  I think they’re realizing that the illusion of "selective democracy" the clerics have been perpetuating for 30 years is precisely that: an illusion meant to keep millions (but probably not yet a solid majority) of reformists at bay. I think these reformists are sick and tired of the mind games the regime has been playing on them, trying to quell dissent by giving them false hope: occasionally loosening the reins, holding elections every four years, even permitting Khatami to be president for eight years while ultimately preventing him from institutionalizing any sort of meaningful reforms in the long term.

As I see it, the Islamic Republic is Machiavellian through and through.  The powers that be know exactly how to manipulate people: to trick them into thinking they've taken two steps forward (as it seemed they did during the Khatami years) only to push them right back to where they started (perhaps even further back) by propping up someone like Ahmadinejad.  Note that allegations of vote rigging are nothing new in Iran: in the first round of the 2005 elections, Karroubi “officially” received about 500,000 fewer votes than Ahmadinejad, and was thus eliminated from the run-off.  He claimed that he had been cheated, a view shared by many others. I wouldn't be surprised if Ahmadinejad's out-of-nowhere rise to power at that time was also orchestrated.

But here is where my rant stops. Because it is precisely in knowing how rotten the system is that I can appreciate the meaning of the nearly 40 million votes cast on June 12th: that is, by voting in this election, Iranians chose to believe--despite the odds being stacked firmly against them--that change can be achieved by working within the framework provided by the constitution of the Islamic Republic. Every time the cynic in me rears its ugly head, whispering that if the system worked, then people's votes would have been counted in the first place, I try to remind myself that optimism itself can be a form of resistance.  As I’m sure the first black president of the United States would agree, we can’t underestimate the “audacity” it takes for people in a de facto totalitarian state to hope for democratic change.

When I saw the millions of people coming out into the streets in those first few days after the election, when I heard the passion and outrage in their voices, it was then that something finally clicked.  I realized I had to put my cynicism aside. Lock it up into a box and throw away the key. Because the popular movement we are seeing in Iran today has become bigger than the election, bigger than Mousavi.  This is now about the Iranian peoples' loss of faith in their government, it's false promise of "ethical democracy" and divinely-sanctioned "justice" for all.  

This is not about my vision for Iran, a vision based on social democracy and the  fundamental principle of separation between church and state.  This is not about the royalists’ vision for Iran, a vision they try to promote at rallies by waving the old monarchic flag.  This is not about the Mujahedin’s vision of Iran, which they try to promote by interrupting those rallies with communist slogans.  This is not about the vision of any fringe group in the diaspora that selfishly wants to promote its own agenda.  This is about supporting the people of Iran who, for whatever reason, voted for Mousavi or Karroubi, or even Rezai, and are now demanding justice on their own terms.  This is about their vision of Iran, whether we agree with it or not, and regardless of our own ideological standpoint.

It’s time we Iranians of the diaspora stop ranting about the future WE want for our native country: stop advocating the necessity of revolution in Iran, stop interrupting moments of silence for the dead with chants of “Down with the Islamic Republic!”  We must realize that these are precisely the sorts of sound bites the regime’s propaganda machine feeds on.  Indeed, state-run TV and newspapers continue to report that protestors are heeding the calls of Zionist agents and being egged on by the BBC and Voice of America; they have even gone so far as to claim that Neda, the young girl whose slow death was witnessed by millions of people across the world, was killed by a “foreign bullet.” Do we really need to supply these Orwellian demagogues with any more fodder for their pathetic brainwashing campaign? Most importantly though, as a community who is living safely outside of Iran, we have no right to insist on radical changes that would only take the Iranian people down an even bloodier path than what we’ve seen so far.

We must stand in solidarity with the Iranians who voted and those who are defending that vote on the ground.  We must speak with a united voice on behalf of those who had enough faith in the system to vote in the first place and who now feel robbed, who demand that their government live up to its promises of democracy within the framework of Islamic values and ethics. Only they can decide what kind of change Iran needs, and only they can weigh the relative risks and benefits of fighting for it.   

I did not vote in the Iranian presidential elections of June 12th 2009: elections that will go down in history as a watershed moment for the Islamic Republic; elections that have irremediably marred the credibility of a government that betrayed its promise of morally-guided democracy.  And for this reason, I did not play any role in triggering the unprecedented changes Iran will doubtless be experiencing in the months and years to come. But I’ll be damned if I don’t speak up in support of those Iranians who, by voting and defending their votes today, demand the right to determine their own destiny.