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Pedro Gonçalves

Tehran tense as Iran's supreme leader endorses vote outcome - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

Iran Mir Hossein Mousavi Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Mehdi Karroubi

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 15 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Iran's supreme leader gave his blessing to the outcome of the country's presidential election Sunday despite widespread allegations of fraud, calling the results "a divine miracle," the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
  • In a letter published on Moussavi's Web site, the candidate said he has asked the election authority -- Iran's Guardian Council -- to nullify Friday's results. There were conflicting reports on whether Moussavi had been placed under house arrest, but in a statement Iranian police said that the candidate was not under arrest.
  • Another opposition candidate said he has asked Iran's Guardian Council -- a body of top clerics and judges that supervises elections -- to investigate. Former parliament speaker Mehdi Karrubi, who finished in third place with a single-digit percentage of the vote in the official results, asked supporters "to find solutions through legal and civic institutions," according to his political movement's newspaper.
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  • Hundreds of regular and riot police were on the streets as civil unrest continued for the second straight day. But it was non-uniformed activists, on foot and on motorcycles, who appeared to be behind the most violent incidents.
  • CNN reporters in Tehran witnessed men, dressed in plain clothes, combing through streets and alleys for anti-Ahmadinejad protesters. Armed with clubs, metal batons and baseball bats, they chased protesters, in some cases beating them.
Pedro Gonçalves

U.S. Officials to Continue to Engage Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14diplo.html

Iran US Obama Ali Khamenei Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Mir Hossein Mousavi Nuclear Proliferation Thomas Pickering

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 14 Jun 09 - Cached
  • The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government, senior officials said Saturday, despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
  • Trying to put a positive face on the outcome, one senior administration official held out the hope that the intensity of the political debate during the campaign, and the huge turnout, might make Mr. Ahmadinejad more receptive to the United States, if only to defuse a potential backlash from the disputed election.“Ahmadinejad could feel that because of public pressure, he wants to reduce Iran’s isolation,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the delicacy of the matter. “That might also cause engagement to proceed more swiftly.”
  • Mr. Pickering, who has had informal contacts with Iranians, said the White House would have little choice but to accept the results. But he said the outcome would hinder efforts to court Tehran and would embolden those who argue that such efforts are futile.
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  • But outside analysts said the suspicions surrounding Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election would create new problems. “This is the worst result,” said Thomas R. Pickering, a former under secretary of state. “The U.S. will have to worry about being perceived as pandering to a president whose legitimacy is in question. It clearly makes the notion of providing incentives quite unappetizing.”
  • In Israel, which has hinted that it might launch a military strike on Iran to disable its nuclear capability, officials said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory underscored the threat from Tehran and the need for a tough response rather than patient diplomacy.Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said in Tel Aviv that the victory “sends a clear message to the world” that Iran’s policies have broad internal support and will be continued. The results, he added, also “blow up in the faces of those” who thought Iran was ready for “a genuine dialogue with the free world on stopping its nuclear program.”
  • Many analysts and Middle East officials asserted that the outcome reinforced the reality that ultimate power resides not in the democratically elected president, but rather in Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.“We should be clear about what we’re dealing with,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Just as we deal with Assad’s Syria and Mubarak’s Egypt, we now have to deal with Khamenei’s Iran,”
  • “It is easy to insult and confront and have Iran as a foe when Ahmadinejad is president,” said an Egyptian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol. “A lot of people would have been inconvenienced if someone else had become president.”
  • Mr. Obama, officials said, has long said he was willing to negotiate with whoever would respond, including Ayatollah Khamenei. “The administration will deal with the situation we have, not what we wish it to be,” another senior official said.
  • For the United States, the larger problem is that while the election has frozen the dialogue, Iran’s nuclear program has speeded ahead. This month, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that by May’s end, Iran had built and installed 7,200 centrifuges to enrich uranium and was quickly adding to its stock of nuclear fuel.
  • Now, the administration faces a vexing choice. It can continue to demand that Iran give up all of its enrichment capability — still the official position of the United States, but considered an all but impossible goal. Or it can tacitly accept that Iran is not going to stop enriching.
Pedro Gonçalves

Memo From Tehran - Reverberations as Door Slams on Hope of Change - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14memo.html

Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Mir Hossein Mousavi Israel

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 14 Jun 09 - Cached
  • There were some important constituencies that took satisfaction from the outcome.Domestically, Mr. Ahmadinejad appealed to the fears of the more pious and poor who had found change unsettling. This included those alarmed by the days of political street carnival preceding the election and those (not just men) put off by Mr. Moussavi’s attention to the traditional, second-class role of women in this paternalistic quasi-theocracy. They were joined by the civil servants, police officers and pensioners who all enjoyed the incumbent’s oil-financed generosity to his base, by those who relished his name-naming attack on corruption and by those who took pride in his defiance of the West. Outside Iran, the result was comforting to hawks in Israel and some Western capitals who had feared that a more congenial Iranian president would cause the world to let down its guard against a country galloping toward nuclear weapons capability. (Mr. Moussavi, while promising a more conciliatory foreign policy, did not disavow the country’s nuclear-processing project, which Iran insists is for civilian ends alone.)
  • The text messaging that is the nervous system of the opposition was shut down, along with universities, Web sites and newspapers the government regarded as hostile. Mr. Moussavi was not allowed a platform on Saturday and barely managed to get out a communiqué calling the election “a magic show.”
Pedro Gonçalves

BBC NEWS | Middle East | New protests over Iran elections - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8104466.stm

Iran Iran Elections 2009 Ali Khamenei

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 17 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi are planning a new demonstration in Tehran in protest at what they see as a fraudulent presidential poll in Iran.The planned rally comes after overnight raids on university dormitories in several Iranian cities and as two pro-reform figures were arrested. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has sought to calm tensions and called for an end to rioting.
  • Protests have grown since his re-election was confirmed on Saturday, with huge demonstrations in Tehran and clashes between protesters and security forces. Eight people have been killed.
  • Iran has imposed tough new restrictions on foreign media, requiring journalists to obtain explicit permission before covering any story. Journalists have also been banned from attending or reporting on any unauthorised demonstration.
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  • Two pro-reform figures, newspaper editor Saeed Laylaz and Hamid Reza Jalaipour, an activist and journalist, were arrested on Wednesday morning, reports said.
  • About 100 reformist figures were arrested on Sunday as opposition grew to the election results. Many have since been released.
  • Overnight, members of Iran's Basij volunteer militia reportedly raided university dormitories in several Iranian cities. The Basij stormed compounds, ransacking dormitories and beating up some students. Several arrests were made, our correspondent says, and the dean of the university in the city of Shiraz has resigned.
  • In the most high-profile incident, 120 lecturers at Tehran university resigned after a raid on that institution.
  • Ayatollah Khamenei has not appeared in public since the election results, but now seems to be deeply involved in the search for a solution to the stand-off. Meeting representatives of the four election candidates, he urged all parties not to agitate their supporters and stir up an already tense situation. He also repeated his offer of a partial vote recount, a proposal already rejected by the main opposition. "In the elections, voters had different tendencies, but they equally believe in the ruling system and support the Islamic Republic," the Associated Press reported him as saying. "Nobody should take any action that would create tension, and all have to explicitly say they are against tension and riots."
  • Witnesses said Tuesday's demonstrators walked in near silence towards state TV headquarters - apparently anxious not to be depicted as hooligans by authorities. Thousands of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's supporters staged a counter-rally in Vali Asr Square in central Tehran - some bussed in from the provinces, observers say.
  • As night fell, residents took to the roof-tops of their houses to shout protest messages across the city, a scene not witnessed since the final days of the Shah, our correspondent says.
Pedro Gonçalves

Leading Clerics Defy Ayatollah on Disputed Iran Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05iran.html

Iran Iran Elections 2009 Mir Hossein Mousavi Qom Association of Researchers and Teachers

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 05 Jul 09 - Cached
  • The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
  • A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final.
  • “This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University.
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  • The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.
  • The documents, published on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, accused supporters of the president of printing more than 20 million extra ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.
  • The association includes reformists, but Iranian political analysts describe it as independent, and it did not support any candidate in the recent election. The group had earlier asked for the election to be nullified because so many Iranians objected to the results, but it never directly challenged the legitimacy of the government and, by extension, the supreme leader.
  • The clerics’ statement chastised the leadership for failing to adequately study complaints of vote rigging and lashed out at the use of force in crushing huge public protests.It even directly criticized the Guardian Council, the powerful group of clerics charged with certifying elections. “Is it possible to consider the results of the election as legitimate by merely the validation of the Guardian Council?” the association said.
  • Many of the accusations of fraud posted on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site Saturday had been published before, but the report did give some more specific charges. For instance, although the government had announced that two of the losing presidential contenders had received relatively few votes in their hometowns, the documents stated that some ballot boxes in those towns contained no votes for the two men.
Argos Media

The Waiting Game: How Will Iran Respond to Obama's Overtures? - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News -... - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...0,1518,618764-2,00.html

Iran Israel Mir Hossein Mousavi Nuclear Proliferation Politics US

shared by Argos Media on 14 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Israel's new right-leaning government, with its Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his warmongering outbursts, is more or less openly threatening a strike -- even without American consent. The Israelis, who have their own nuclear weapons, cite the Iranian president's irrationality as justification. They assume that Ahmadinejad is planning a nuclear attack on the Jewish state, without consideration for Israel's certain vehement retaliation.
  • In fact, Ahmadinejad has made no secret of his desire to see Israel wiped off the map of the Middle East. But he has also repeatedly stressed that he has no intention to attack "the Zionist entity" with armed force.
  • The conservative Arab nations, with their Sunni majorities, are now just as concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions as the fact that the Iraqi government now enjoys the best of relations with its fellow Shiites in Tehran. Tehran's increasing power also strengthens its militant clients in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Hamas and Hezbollah.
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  • Iran is not simply a medium-sized regional power that can be ordered around at will. Ironically, America's disastrous war in Iraq has allowed its fierce adversaries in Tehran to benefit from a massive shift of power in the Middle East.
  • Before his ascent to the office of president, not even diplomats stationed in Tehran and familiar with all of the ins and outs of Iranian politics were familiar with this short man with the sparse beard and piercing eyes. The fiery revolutionary, hardworking to the point of exhaustion and filled with contempt for earthly wealth, rose to power from humble beginnings and became the hope of all "Mostasafin," the disenfranchised millions without whom the Islamic Republic probably would not exist today and for whom Ahmadinejad has fashioned himself into an Iranian Robin Hood.
  • This places the Americans before the virtually impossible task of joining forces with Iran to resolve the classic Middle East conflict and its 30-year conflict with Tehran itself. For this reason, the Iraq question is also becoming increasingly urgent for Washington.
  • Obama knows that the United States could derive substantial benefits from cooperation with Tehran. Without Iran, for example, it will be almost impossible to bring peace to Afghanistan in the long term. In Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the center of conflict that Washington describes in its new strategic concept as a single unit known as "AfPak" -- the Americans and Shiite Iran have many interests in common. Tehran's rulers battled the Sunni Taliban radicals, whom they have always seen as dangerous neighbors and ideological foes, before the Americans did.
  • And Tehran, with the world's second-largest natural gas reserves and its third-largest oil reserves, has the capacity to do a great deal of damage to the international economy -- or help it overcome the global economic crisis.
  • Conversely, rapprochement with the United States and Europe would also bring enormous benefits to the Iranians. Without know-how from the West, the country will hardly manage to achieve the modernization it needs so urgently. With inflation approaching 30 percent and real unemployment exceeding 20 percent (12 percent, according to official figures), and more than a million drug addicts -- a distressing world record of addiction -- the country faces practically insurmountable problems.
  • Whether the internally divided Palestinians will manage to come to terms and form a unified government for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is no longer in the hands of the inconsequential negotiators in Cairo, but will be decided instead by Hamas's patrons in Tehran. Tehran also decides whether the Lebanese Hezbollah or Hamas's extremists use primarily words to express their hostility toward Israel or, as is currently the case, resume their bloody terrorist attacks instead.
  • Ahmadinejad feels obligated to the permanently downtrodden members of society. As if he were one of them, he campaigned for president four years ago in Tehran's massive poor neighborhoods, traveled to the country's most remote places and promised the underprivileged their share of Iran's riches. He told them that he would fill their empty plates with the proceeds from the sale of oil, and that he would declare war on corruption and nepotism. The "era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end," Ahmadinejad told supporters after his election.
  • But the political achievements of President Ahmadinejad have been more miserable than stellar. In addition to isolating his country even further in the world, he has ruined its economy with his chaotic economic policies. In the devastating assessment of Ali Larijani, the president of the Iranian parliament and Ahmadinejad's biggest domestic rival, whom he previously removed from his position as Iran's chief nuclear negotiator with the West: "The confusion is the result of the government arbitrarily dissolving offices and dismissing experts, ignoring parliamentary resolutions and stubbornly going its own way."
  • Nevertheless, it is quite possible that this man, who has probably done more damage to his country than any other president in the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic, will enter a second term this summer -- simply because he lacks a convincing and courageous opponent.
  • Moussavi is of a significantly more robust nature than Khatami. As prime minister during the years of the Iraq war, he successfully managed the country's wartime economy. Critics note, however, that Moussavi's tenure was marked by a sharp rise in arrests and repression. He has not held any public office in 20 years and is virtually unknown among younger Iranians, who make up about 60 percent of the population.
  • On the surface, the elegant Moussavi would undoubtedly represent Iran more effectively on the international stage than Ahmadinejad. He appears to be more open to negotiations with the Americans. And yet, when it comes to the central nuclear conflict, the new candidate is just as obstinate as the current president. At a press conference in Tehran just last Monday, he noted that he too would not back down on the issue.
  • Which candidate the powerful religious leader Khamenei ends up supporting will likely be the decisive question. When Ahmadinejad came into office, he kissed Khamenei's hand. The two men were long considered extremely close ideologically, although since then Khamenei has more or less openly criticized Ahmadinejad's economic policies. Only recently, however, the religious leader spoke so positively about the president that many interpreted his words as an endorsement of his candidacy. Many observers of Iranian politics believe Ahmadinejad, because of his lasting popularity in rural areas, will be elected to a second term.
  • There are no questions that the Iranian president does not answer with questions of his own. He insists, most of all, on a few core concepts. One of them is justice, but he defines what justice is. Another is respect. He claims that he and his country are not afforded sufficient respect. This desire for recognition seems almost insatiable.
  • In Ahmadinejad's view, "hagh chordan," or the act of trampling on the rights of the Iranians, is a pattern that constantly repeats itself and comes from all sides, leading to a potentially dangerous mix of a superiority and an inferiority complex -- but not the irrationality of which the president is so often accused, especially by the Israelis.
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