A few thousand Iranian young people demonstrated in Iran on Saturday morning to protest the announcement by that country’s Interior Ministry that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won a second term by an overwhelming margin of 63 percent. The president’s rivals decried ballot fraud and many observers saw the results as a hard-liner coup. If the government really has descended to the level of fixing the presidential elections, it is a sign of deep insecurity and fear of change, as Tehran is challenged by the Obama administration’s outreach and by reformist stirrings among youth and women.
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The final vote counts alleged for cities and provinces, even more so than the landslide claimed by the incumbent nationally, strongly suggest a last-minute and clumsy fraud.
Salon.com | Ahmadinejad reelected under cloud of fraud
All of this had the appearance of a well orchestrated strike intended to take its opponents by surprise – the classic definition of a coup. Curiously, this was not a coup of an outside group against the ruling elite; it was a coup of the ruling elite against its own people.
I talked to my brother who is in Tehran a couple of hours ago. YouTube is apparently down (filtered). The satellite TV and international radio stations (SW) are also jammed. But apparently a VOA satellite TV station has started to broadcast on a new frequency and so they have access to that. They had also lost the cell-phone service. (The phone system is operated by the Ministry of Technology and Communications; so it is state run.) It really is feeling like a coup.
From The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Awful. Simply awful. I fear that things will become far more unstable and possibly violent as Ahmadinejad looses what little popularity he has and the scope of the fraud becomes public.
