Iran reformists split on election boycott

Neil MacFarquhar, International Herald Tribune:

With two weeks left in Iran's short presidential election campaign, the reformist camp finds itself facing a fork in the road: a decision to vote or to boycott the ballot. READ MORE

Iran's reform movement emerged full-blown after the surprise triumph of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997. After he defeated the chosen candidate of Iran's mullahs by a wide margin, hopes soared among many Iranians that he could usher in greater political and social freedoms.

But hard-line clerics retained control over the powerful police, judiciary and intelligence agencies, reigning in demonstrations, shutting down outspoken newspapers and disqualifying reformist candidates for office.

Now reformists are split in a debate that goes to the heart of the movement's future. One faction wants people to vote so that voices demanding change are heard. The rest say that approach has been a dismal failure. They argue that only a boycott of the vote will embarrass the ruling mullahs, who exercise near-absolute power over elected officials, including the president, into loosening their stranglehold on power.

Some politicians around Khatami argue that he created enough political dialogue that they must continue working within the system to make it freer.

But a whole swath of other Iranians, students and some politicians find this notion laughable. They exude a widespread bitterness and frustration with Khatami because he did not use his whopping popular mandate to push harder for basic civil liberties.

This faction is loosely organized and admits to having no real strategy or clear agenda, wanting change but simultaneously at a loss over how to achieve it.

"There is a kind of deadlock in the process of reformation and peaceful change, so the people are indifferent," said Hermidas Davoud Bavand, a professor of international law at Alameh University in Tehran. "Their only option is passive resistance. It is a vote of no confidence in the system."

To these voters, a boycott increasingly seems like the only way to register their objections to the current system.

"The experience of the past eight years has proven to us that nobody who comes to power can achieve anything if his ideas clash with those of the supreme leader or the establishment," said Mehdi Aminzadeh, a student leader imprisoned for 90 days in 2003.

The loudest, most influential voice calling for an election boycott has been that of Akbar Ganji, a crusading writer imprisoned for, among other things, exposing the killing of dissidents by government death squads in the 1990s.

In a manifesto written from jail, Ganji states in strikingly blunt terms that basic civil rights are nonexistent in Iran because they would obstruct the absolute power of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme religious leader.

Ganji urges Iranians to avoid voting on June 17 to signal their rejection of a system that grants to just one man sweeping powers over the military, judiciary, key appointed bodies and the state-controlled media.

"The path that the reformers have picked for reform will not lead to democracy," says the manifesto, which electrified student activists because it suggested a strategy for moving the reform movement ahead.

"The transition requires taking legitimacy away from the ruler and not cooperating with him," the manifesto says. "The despotic system will be weakened and undermined if there is no continuous cooperation with it."

Ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the mullahs have used high turnouts at everything from Friday prayers to elections to signal the public's support for clerical rule. Attendance at prayers grows ever more sparse, but turnout in presidential elections has remained high.

In the last presidential race in 2001 with 42 million eligible voters, turnout was put at 68 percent. The turnout in 1997, when Khatami swept to office, was 70 percent.

In both cases, the ranks were swelled by the young - a huge number in a country where two-thirds of the population of 70 million is younger than 30 - who mobilized in the hope that Khatami would institute reform.

University professors, politicians and foreign diplomats are predicting the turnout this year at anywhere from 60 percent to below 30 percent, with voting in large cities expected to be particularly light.

Although the ruling clerics will retain power without the support of Iranian voters, a high turnout would strengthen their hand in everything from negotiating with the West over Iran's nuclear development program to dispelling the Bush administration's veiled threats about regime change.

Temporarily, at least, a boycott also would help hard-line candidates. This is because the true believers in the Islamic revolution, about 20 percent of the population, would make it to the polls in disproportionate numbers.

The author says that the 1997 election saw a 70% turnout. But most reports I have seen put the number closer to 85%. The fact is that the results shift with the wind.

This is important, because the regime is likely to inflate the poll results to provide "legitamacy" to the election. A turnout of less than 40% would be a disaster for the regime.