Iran's Giant Question Mark: To Vote or Not?

Neil MacFarquhar, The New York Times:

With just days left in Iran's short presidential election campaign, the reformist camp finds itself facing a fork in the road: 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, reining 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 governing mullahs - who exercise near-absolute power over elected officials, including the president - into loosening their stranglehold on power.

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

But a whole swath of other Iranians - academics, students and some politicians - find that notion laughable. They are bitter about President Khatami's failure to use his whopping popular mandate to push harder for basic civil liberties. That 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."

[The general focus on the elections was eclipsed on June 12 by small but deadly explosions in both Tehran and the provincial city of Ahvaz, and two more insignificant bombings on June 13 in the southeastern city of Zahedan. Several suspects were arrested in the Ahvaz bombings, according to the Ministry of Intelligence, but there was no immediate connection made between the vote to come on June 17 and the violence. Some have speculated that one faction or another might be trying to make voters nervous enough to stay home.]

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 1990's.

In a 20-page manifesto written from jail, Mr. 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. Mr. 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," reads 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 despotic system will be weakened and undermined if there is no continuous cooperation with it."

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

In the last race for president in 2001, with 42 million eligible voters, turnout was put at 68 percent, compared with the 90 percent turnout in 1997, when Mr. Khatami swept to power with 70 percent of the vote. In both cases, the ranks were swelled by the young - a huge number in a country where two-thirds of the 70 million population is under 30 - mobilizing in the hope that President Khatami would institute reform.

University professors, politicians and foreign diplomats are predicting that 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 governing 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 would also help hard-line candidates, because the well-organized true believers in the Islamic revolution, some 20 percent of the population, would make it to the polls in disproportionate numbers.

The main reformist camp of politicians thinks a boycott would be a mistake, a surrender to the hard-liners. Their candidate for president, Dr. Mostafa Moin, and some long-persecuted opposition figures, like Ibrahim Yazdi, are urging Iranians to vote.

Dr. Moin, a pediatrician, was initially eliminated by the Guardians Council, an appointed hard-line group that vets all candidates. But he was reinstated at the behest of Ayatollah Khamenei. Boycott proponents urged him not to run, suggesting the stigma of being beholden to the supreme leader for his slot just underscored all the weaknesses that plagued President Khatami.

But Dr. Moin decided to run anyway. "I have come to reform the incorrect relations in the power structure," read a statement confirming his candidacy.

Others fear the cost of inaction might be the conservatives' sweeping to power and reversing hard-won social freedoms - like the minimalist long shirts and skimpy scarves young women now wear to obey the law that they be veiled. Some reformists argue that no matter who wins, change is inevitable because the population is so young and so hungry for technology and other fruits derived from contact with the rest of the world.

"The Iranian people are on a train moving toward democracy that cannot be derailed," said Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a cleric and former vice president turned blogger. "If the government pushes this train it will move faster, but it will keep moving no matter what."