Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor | July 02
THE missing actor in the tragic and gruesome story of Iran since the stolen election of June 12 has been the Western human rights lobby. Where is it?
What has happened in Iran is one of the pivotal events of our time. Tens of millions of Iranians voted against their demented President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the corrupt, clerical misrule he represents. No one seriously doubts the electoral fraud.
With 40 million paper ballots to count, the Iranian authorities announced the result of the election two hours after polls closed.
Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi and the other opposition candidates were not allowed to scrutinise the counting. The margin of Ahmadinejad's alleged victory - 11 million votes - was patently absurd. The final touch: the alleged margin was almost identical across most parts of the country, despite huge regional and ethnic differences.
The point is this was not meant to be a convincing fraud. It was a brazen, supremely arrogant exercise in brute power. The votes, in effect, were not counted at all. The process showed the absolute contempt in which the regime holds elections. It demonstrated the dictator's most important asset: the will to power.
Since then the Iranian dictatorship has behaved with remarkable savagery. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the stolen election and to vent their frustration at the medieval dictatorship they are forced to endure.
For the first few days the regime let them protest.
Then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned them to get off the streets. What has followed has been one of the most brutal crackdowns on democratic sentiment in recent years.
The regime acknowledges the deaths of 17 protesters. At least 40 Iranian journalists have been imprisoned. CNN, early in the business, reported 150 protesters had died in a single day.
The hated Basij militia, a unit of the Revolutionary Guard, has savagely beaten hundreds of demonstrators. It has also stabbed, shot and clubbed to death many people.
The image of the beautiful young Neda Agha Soltan as she lay dying after being shot at a demonstration, almost certainly by Basij militiamen, for a moment transfixed the world. Mousavi has described the rulers of Iran as "proponents of a petrified, Taliban-style Islam".
Despite the regime's successful if crude reassertion of basic power, this is a vulnerable time for Ahmadinejad and his cohorts. It is not only that there is popular revolt and division within the clerics. There is also now a flowering international Shia debate about whether clerics should play a direct role in politics. Inside Iran, power has flowed away from Khamenei and the other clerics and towards Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard.
But an ideologically based dictatorship is often at its weakest when it has to resort to crude military rule.
This was the case when Poland declared martial law in 1981. It was then in plain sight for the world to behold: a military dictatorship, pure and simple. The flimsy rags of ideological purpose that global communism had conferred on the Polish government were stripped away. The Polish regime then, like the Iranian regime today, was to be seen in George Orwell's terms as simply a boot treading on a human face, over and over again.
This is the undeniable story of Iran. So where are the Western demonstrators? Read more here...
Source: The Australian
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