TEHRAN, June 13, 2009
Ahmadinejad Named Victor; Fraud Charged
Challenger Urges Supporters To Resist "Dictatorship"; Iran Expert Calls Claim Of Landslide "Not A Real Election"
-
Play CBS Video Video Iran: Both Sides Claim Victory There is strong debate over the presidential elections in Iran, as challenger Mir Hossein Moussavi and current leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad each remain defiant. Elizabeth Palmer reports from Tehran.
-
-
Surrounded by his bodyguards, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greets his supporters before casting his ballot in Tehran, June, 12, 2009. (AP Photo/Arash Khamushi)
-
Leading challenger and reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi holds his inked finger aloft after casting his vote with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, at the Ershad mosque on the outskirts of Tehran, June 12, 2009. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
-
-
Photo Essay Iran Elections Iranians begin voting on whether to keep Ahmadinejad in power for four more years.
Anti-riot police guarded the offices overseeing Iran's disputed elections Saturday with the count pointing to a landslide victory by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while his opponent denounced the results as "treason" and threatened a challenge.
Iran's government said the incumbent Ahmadinejad is the winner with a landslide 62.63 percent of the vote. Top opposition contender Mir Hossein Mousavi took only 33.75 percent of vote in a result disputed by his supporters.
The results had flowed quickly after polls closed showing the hard-line president with a comfortable lead - defying expectations of a nail-biter showdown following a month of fierce campaigning and bringing immediate charges of vote rigging by Mousavi.
A statement from Mousavi posted on his Web site urged his supporters to resist a "governance of lie and dictatorship."
The Interior Ministry also said 85 percent of Iran's 46.2 million eligible voters went to the polls - setting a new record. On Friday, many polling stations were jam-packed with people waiting several hours to cast their ballots.
Tensions are high in Tehran this morning. Many people opened shops and carried out errands, but the backdrop was far from normal: black-clad police gathered around key government buildings, and mobile phone text messaging was blocked in an apparent attempt to stifle one of the main communication tools of the pro-reform movement of Mousavi.
The outcome of the race is pivotal not only for Iran, but also for Middle East politics as well, says CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reporting form Tehran.
About 85 percent of Iranians turned out to vote yesterday - that's a record - in the most bitterly contested political battle in the country's history. Polls were kept open four hours later to accommodate the long lines.
But it doesn't look as if the fight is over yet.
Just hours after the polls had closed last night, election officials announced that the president was in the lead. The reformist opposition candidate Mousavi reacted immediately with a counterclaim that he had won and that there had been serious election irregularities.
Millions of mostly young Iranians desperate for change and who supported Mousavi in passionate pre-election rallies were crushed and furious.
There have been clashes all through the night and into the morning outside Mousavi's campaign headquarters in the nation's capital. Palmer witnessed some people being beaten and chased away by riot police today.
But the real potential for violence would come if there are large masses of protesters and that hasn't happened yet - and the riot police are out in force.
It is very unclear what will happen now. President Ahmadinejad's mostly rural working class supporters were thrilled with his victory. But in the cities, most of the Mousavi strongholds, the authorities have warned they will suppress any popular uprising.
Mousavi, who became the hero of a powerful youth-driven movement, had not made a public address or issued messages since declaring himself the true victor moments after polls closed and accusing authorities of "manipulating" the vote.
"I'm warning that I won't surrender to this manipulation," said the Mousavi statement on the Web on Saturday. "The outcome of what we've seen from the performance of officials ... is nothing but shaking the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran sacred system and governance of lie and dictatorship."
He warned "people won't respect those who take power through fraud" and called the decision to announce Ahmadinejad winner of the election was a "treason to the votes of the people."
The headline on one of Mousavi's Web sites: "I wont give in to this dangerous manipulation." Mousavi and key aides could not be reached by phone.
It was even unclear how many Iranians were even aware of Mousavi's claims of fraud. Communications disruptions began in the later hours of voting Friday - suggesting an information clampdown. State television and radio only broadcast the Interior Ministry's vote count and not Mousavi's midnight press conference.
Nationwide, the text messaging system remained down Saturday and several pro-Mousavi Web sites were blocked or difficult to access. Text messaging is frequently used by many Iranians - especially young Mousavi supporters - to spread election news.
 | Photos: Iran Elections An Iranian woman holds her identity documents as she stands in line to cast her vote at Masoumeh shrine in Qom about 120 kms south of Tehran, Friday, June 12, 2009. (Photo: AP) |
At a press conference, Mousavi declared himself "definitely the winner" based on "all indications from all over Iran." He accused the government of "manipulating the people's vote" to keep Ahmadinejad in power and suggested the reformist camp would stand up to challenge the results.
"It is our duty to defend people's votes. There is no turning back," Mousavi said, alleging widespread irregularities.
Mousavi's backers were stunned at Interior Ministry's results after widespread predictions of a close race - or even a slight edge to Mousavi.
"Many Iranians went to the people because they wanted to bring change. Almost everybody I know voted for Mousavi but Ahmadinejad is being declared the winner. The government announcement is nothing but widespread fraud. It is very, very disappointing. I'll never ever again vote in Iran," said Mousavi supporter Nasser Amiri, a hospital clerk in Tehran.
Bringing any showdown into the streets would certainly face a swift backlash from security forces. The political chief of the powerful Revolutionary Guard cautioned Wednesday it would crush any "revolution" against the Islamic regime by Mousavi's "green movement" - the signature color of his campaign and the new banner for reformists seeking wider liberties at home and a gentler face for Iran abroad.
The Revolutionary Guard is the military wing directly under control of the ruling clerics and has vast influence in every corner of the country through a network of volunteer militias.
In Tehran, several Ahmadinejad supporters cruised the streets waving Iranian flags out of their car windows and shouting "Mousavi is dead!"
Mousavi appealed directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to intervene and stop what he said were violations of the law. Khamenei holds ultimate political authority in Iran. "I hope the leader's foresight will bring this to a good end," Mousavi said.
Mousavi said some polling stations were closed early with people still waiting to vote, that voters were prevented from casting ballots and that his observers were expelled from some counting sites.
Iran does not allow international election monitors. During the 2005 election, when Ahmadinejad won the presidency, there were some allegations of vote rigging from losers, but the claims were never investigated.
The outcome will not sharply alter Iran's main policies or sway major decisions, such as possible talks with Washington or nuclear policies. Those crucial issues rest with the ruling clerics headed by the unelected Khamenei.
But the election focused on what the office can influence: boosting Iran's sinking economy, pressing for greater media and political freedoms, and being Iran's main envoy to the world.
Before the vote count, President Barack Obama said the "robust debate" during the campaign suggests a possibility of change in Iran, which is under intense international pressure over its nuclear program. There has been no comment from Washington since the results indicated re-election for Ahmadinejad.
The race will go to a runoff on June 19 if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote. Two other candidates - conservative former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei and moderate former parliament speaker Mahdi Karroubi - only got small fractions of the votes, according to the ministry.
Iran Expert: Results Are "Blatant Fraud"
"Iranians are very proud of their election process," Reza Aslan, author of "How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the War on the End of Terrorism," said on CBS' The Early Show. "There is very little that is democratic in Iran except for the elections which are, frankly, the freest and among the fairest in the region.
"This kind of blatant fraud has never really happened before," Aslan said. "Two to one, this is not a real election here. And I don't think the young people who came out, you know, by the tens of thousands are going to actually put up with this."
Aslan said that broad opposition to Iran's current president - what he called the "Anyone But Ahmadinejad Vote" - was the overwhelming sentiment across the country. "So I really have a hard time believing that these groups, these sort of different coalitions which include some on the far right, many groups in the center, including Rafsanjani, a powerful figure in Iran, and the reformist camp, it will be hard to say they're going to go home and accept this quietly."
"How long could this drag on?" asked
"The election itself has been called," Aslan said. "There is very little chance that any official, particularly the Supreme Leader Khamenei, will step in and throw out the elections and start over again.
"I think that what the younger voters and, as Mousavi said, the reformist camp are going to do is see how far they can just sort of push for the kind of civil unrest that at the very least will show Ahmadinejad that he's being watched, and that the election committee is going to have to answer for some improprieties."
There may also be a question mark over relations between Washington and Tehran. "Regardless [of the results], I think Barack Obama decided his administration will open up to Iran regardless of who is the president there. Obviously [it] would have been a lot easier if it had been Mousavi instead of Ahmadinejad," said Aslan.
"But even if Ahmadinejad had barely won the elections and there weren't these reports of absurd and explicit fraud from one end of the country to the other, it would have been a lot easier for Obama to say, 'Well, this is the new Iranian government, this is the government we're going to deal with.' At this point, who knows what is going to happen? I think the best thing for Obama to do is stay out of it and let's see what the Iranians themselves figure out."
© MMIX, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
More From World
Add a Comment See all 200 Comments
- If these people are so bent on reconstruction why is that SOB still breathing? They talk a loud banter but no bang for thier country. What no guns left from thier last fkedup attempt to do something right. MICE NOT MEN! iT IS LAUGHABLE AT THE VERY LEAST. BIG COWARDS WITH little stones.
- Reply to this comment
- They use the same ballot procedures to choose their leader in the West Bank. In Gaza, it's just a shoot-out.
- Reply to this comment
- Iran uses paper ballots and the strongest support for opposition leader Mousavi is in Iranian cities. Polls remained open for hours after normal closing times to accommodate the flood of voters. 2 hours after the Polls closed, Ahmadinejad was declared the landslide winner with 63% of the vote. This is clearly a fraud, there is no way to count the thousands of paper ballots by hand in just 2 hours and come to that conclusion, not to mention the thousands of ballots from Iranians voting outside the country. Landslide FRAUD is more like it!
- Reply to this comment
- CUCKOO! CUCKOO! CUCKOO!
Posted by PhilistineTheArtLover at 10:54 AM : Jun 14, 2009
was that your former name before Philistine ? - Reply to this comment
- It was Jonathan Swift who wrote that the sperm, "raised and inflammed, became adust, converted to choler, turned head upon the spinal duct, and ascended to the brain."
This might account for the violence of the Near East, where the crowded conditions of certain villages may have futher inflammed the situation, having led some fellows to forceably share this fluid among themselves, due to the abscence of non-mutilated women. - Reply to this comment
- When faced with the comments we find on the cbs blog, we can only wonder if evil, insanity or stupidity is their cause. Suspended in this X-Y-Z axis, like a mosquito in amber -- or some more foul excretion -- we can only hope the creature, a lone thought in a decayed intellect, died a merciful death.
- Reply to this comment
- But forget about Iran, only the Palestinians are real. We're speaking so amiably here -- please quote from the UN Resolutions condemning Egypt's annexation of Gaza and Jordan's annexation of the West Bank. Please quote from the world's leaders demanding the independence of these provinces. Please quote from your own memos regarding the Black September uprising against the Jordanian government -- which, by the way, represents a fairly large Palestine in its own right and by marriage to its royal family will be ruled by Palestinians -- whatever that description means.
- Reply to this comment
- Flee for the peace and calm of Moscow.
- Reply to this comment
- Now some of the Iranians know how we feel in America. Crooked, corrupt and stolen elections. Special interests, mostly rich corporations controlling everything including the elections.
- Reply to this comment
- Moreover, as street-gang leaders indistinquishable from their Lebanese, Syrian, Gazan or Jordanian brothers (these nations carved from the same territory after WW2) there is at least supposed to be some patronage, some sharing of the gang's spoils, not the endless hustle of one's own grimey neighborhood until ejected by their brothers, ejected even from the camps their brothers designed for them, and relying on the ignorance of infidel overseas.
- Reply to this comment
- Obama crying on Hillarys shoulder. Why... why... why... wont Iran be friends with me? I tried so hard. I wished them happy new year.
LMAO - Reply to this comment
- Because repetition of the Big Lie aside, how can people who were Syrians 100 years ago and Jordanians 50 years ago become Palestinians except at the inconvenience of others, principally due to their xenophobic religious intolerance of anyone who has benefited from the secular world in the past 500 years? This would be clear unless they are the false-cause of all those who feel the need to ride with malcontents while maintaining the safe distance of their own squalid home.
- Reply to this comment
- The Mullahs and Ayotollahs win again.
We all really know Iranians want freedoms and equal rights for women etc etc..
I smell a riot coming soon.
Posted by inmyexpertise at 2:25 PM : Jun 13, 2009
I see a series of (government sponsored Clandestine) Bombings (suicide or otherwise) until there are a lot fewer Liberals in Iran than there are now. - Reply to this comment
- The Palestinians have stolen all of the land they have by virtue of the partition of Greater Syria followed by the military division of Jordan. They have added nothing except for a corrupt welfare apparatus, a spurious identification with ancient Mediterranean seafarers, and the sympathy of those who are themselves destined for a hobo jungle.
Meanwhile their leadership was allied with the Nazis during WW2 and Yasser Arafat's widow lives-off the loot of the PLO in Paris. Nice work if you can get it.
Posted by YrSoWrong at 4:37 PM : Jun 13, 2009
Even the JNF said that they owned only 12.5% of the land in 1948:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Orgs/jnf.html
How could they ADMITTEDLY own 12.5% of the land in early 1948, 50% in LATE 1948, 66% after the 1967 war, and how do they currently squat on 83% of all of the land, if they're not "stealing it"? - Reply to this comment
- The Palestinians have stolen all of the land they have by virtue of the partition of Greater Syria followed by the military division of Jordan. They have added nothing except for a corrupt welfare apparatus, a spurious identification with ancient Mediterranean seafarers, and the sympathy of those who are themselves destined for a hobo jungle.
Meanwhile their leadership was allied with the Nazis during WW2 and Yasser Arafat's widow lives-off the loot of the PLO in Paris. Nice work if you can get it. - Reply to this comment
- Evil won't be around forever mr. Bible hater. Your stubborn pride and denial of the events that will occur to end the evil doesn't change a thing.
There is no "hoping" for the End days. They will happen eventually, and you'll be kicking and screaming on internet message forums just like you're doing now hoping the events don't come true.
The evil in this world won't go on forever.....and you're denial of the Truth won't change a thing.
Posted by Audacity_of_Deception at 3:31 PM : Jun 13, 2009
Well, let's see......
Your "god" created the world 3,100 years ago, and evil is not only alive and well, it's thriving.
Judging by your "god's" track record, evil isn't going anywhere, and in fact it's only getting worse. - Reply to this comment
- I don't defend everything he did anyhow. I live in the present, not the past......
perhaps you should try it sometime.
;)
Posted by Audacity_of_Deception at 2:57 PM : Jun 13, 2009
So you DO NOT live by the tenets of the bible? - Reply to this comment
- He is an example of a brain turned off by religious fanaticism.
Ahmadinejad has the same disease brought about by a different religion. - Reply to this comment
- Lies, lies, lies, lies, and more lies. The Israelis didn't kick anyone off of their land. The land was desolate before Jewish migration to it began in the late 19th century early 20th century.
Posted by Audacity_of_Deception at 2:54 PM : Jun 13, 2009
Right. And the 400,000 "nakba" victims just decided to bankrupt themselves, and become homeless "on a whim", for no apparent reason, right?
What a dingbat.
Even the JNF said that they owned only 12.5% of the land in 1948:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Orgs/jnf.html
How could they ADMITTEDLY own 12.5% of the land in early 1948, 50% in LATE 1948, 66% after the 1967 war, and how do they currently squat on 83% of all of the land, if they're not "stealing it"? - Reply to this comment
- Audacity_of_Deception = Audacity_of_Self_Delusion
Religion has a vested interest in the promulgation and spread of evil -- it scatters the seeds of evil wherever it goes, destroys natural ethical systems, flouts personal ethics and is riddled with hypocrisy. But any church, any religion, any moral code, is the same as any other. They are all designed to disable the individual. People use religion to avoid having to make ethical decisions in their own lives, to avoid having to listen to their conscience, to avoid responsibility for their behavior. Hypocrisy is not anomalous, but integral, to the practice of religion.
-- Richard G Rieben, Ethics for Earthlings (2000), p. 27 - Reply to this comment
Mike Huckabee on GOP "rock stars," 2012, health care reform and more.
