Word: voting
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Disputes over alleged vote-rigging in last week's elections have touched off days of rioting in Tehran...
...recruit young men to fight against Iraq. But a decade later, they took on the role of an official morality police, becoming better known for raiding parties than for raiding the Iraqi front line." In 2005, she says, they took on an unprecedented function when they got out the vote that propelled Ahmadinejad into the presidency by a landslide. Now, it appears, they're being deployed to ensure he remains in office...
Four years ago, during a similarly sultry Tehran summer, I had an argument with Shirin Ebadi about whether Iranians should vote in their country's presidential elections. The human-rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate believed that Iranians should boycott the vote. She argued coolly that people's participation lent legitimacy to an undemocratic regime's flawed electoral process. At the time, I found her view frustratingly staid, the stance of someone who had lost touch with young people's immediate concerns. I felt that boycotting elections made a prize of abstract ideals over daily realities. I had experienced...
That summer of 2005, many Iranians actually heeded Ebadi's call and boycotted the vote. This helped the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand leader who proceeded to gut the country's economy and sully Iran's reputation in the world. Reformist politicians, whose candidates had fared badly at the polls, told moderate Iranians that they were to blame for Ahmadinejad's victory. If the so-called silent majority - the millions of middle-class, educated Iranians who seek more freedom and economic opportunity - had voted, the emerging wisdom went, then the country wouldn't have been lost to the lunatic...
...four years that followed, many Iranians bitterly regretted their decision not to vote. I was living in Beirut in 2005, and failed to cast my ballot at the Iranian embassy there. When I moved to Iran later that year and began to suffer the slowly emerging consequences of Ahmadinejad's victory, I scolded myself daily. Ambivalence and laziness had gotten the better of me, and I deserved to suffer the consequences. I also scolded all my friends and relatives who hadn't voted. When they complained about double-digit inflation, a real estate price hike of 150%, five-hour lines...