Sunday,
March 7, 2003
The statement about the February 28
Municipal elections
Ballots bring the honeymoon of 'reforms'
to an end. The ever-present silent cry of the people of Iran
has once again made it to the world's political news. And this is the third
message that Iranian citizens send in the safest and the least costly way they
know. May the authorities hear this deafening
silence! But do they?
Among the power elite and their media allies,
there are people who, as always and as could not be expected otherwise, present
the negative of the image they see instead of its original. The presence of the
people by the millions in the 1997 and 2001 elections was simply represented as
a response to such and such person's call, and their clear and significant
votes were interpreted as votes for the System. But how are they going to
explain the mere12% to 18% participation of the people in major cities in the
February 28 elections? Where the elections are free of ethnic and religious
prejudices and the presence or lack thereof of the people is purely a political
act, what are they going to call the refusal of 80% of eligible voters to
perform their legitimate duty? Clearly, they cannot but take the pitifully
small portion of the glass [i.e. the 20% who participated and mostly voted for
Fundamentalists] and celebrate the 'victory of the Fundamentalists' with it
while letting the Reformists have the larger portion [i.e. the 80% who didn't
participate at all] which is only a void of rage and silence. Of course, it is
their choice to descend towards corruption with such vigor, sinking in
the darkest ignorance, but if one was to comment on their logic, one has to say
that they do indeed insult the intelligence of observers.
The other group, Dovvom
e Khordadi ha ['affiliated with May 23, 1997'],
however, were so indulged in their victory in previous elections that they
forgot to look around and make sure that they still had people left in the
audience applauding for them when they were happily choosing a new mayor. When they found their 14 million supporters disappointed by them on
May 2001, reform theoreticians simply left it to the Authoritarians to take
care of the matter, as if they had such will or legitimacy to bring back the
votes of the people. If they could really do so, what has this entire
struggle over the past 5 years been about?
Indeed, it is a source of concern that even
the presence of the oppressed opposition, the Supreme Leader's dissatisfaction
with the candidates' qualification process, and the relative freedom of the
elections were not enough to motivate people to participate in the elections.
It looks like the apathy, which all the optimists and advocates of
election-based reforms tried to kill every time it was conceived, is finally
celebrating its birth right now, right here in this city. Whatever you call it,
it is the offspring of our society's mental and psychic frustration over generously
yet uselessly investing its votes, emotions, and positions in 'reforms'. Add
all that to the shameful performance of Tehran's
City Council and its pitiful fate, in order to understand why 30 million
Iranians passed by the election polls with a sneer and preferred to follow the
latest news of the US's
assault on their neighboring country, Iraq.
A large number of people in Tehran,
Isfahan,
and Shiraz demonstrated passive
resistance by choosing not to use their right to vote, a right that every
nation pays a high price to achieve. As part of the Student Movement, we
believe that their action cannot be easily judged as right or wrong. To
patiently enforce the collective will through participation in elections is
still considered by the analysts as the least costly means of achieving
political goals. However, maybe the public no longer buys the idea that every
political withdrawal equals more violence, repression, chaos, and foreign
interference. Maybe some unwritten and intuitive agreement has passed through
the public's mind to give itself freely to a new experience, i.e. passive resistance,
while consciously avoiding the pitfalls of complete chaos and disintegration.
We warn you of an attitude that is becoming
more and more common, be it a good sign or a bad one. What exactly it is, how
it works, and where it ends is what a superior judge, i.e. the 12th
Imam, will determine. But at this point one thing is clear and that is, if the
Reformists do not want to end up in the museum of political history or to
become bearers of meaningless titles by the next parliamentary elections next year,
they need to stop repeating the same rotten and boring ideas of the reform
discourse. If they cannot provide the voters with new options, then they should
join the rest of us in our efforts to put this 'most free, stable and
democratic system of the world' out of its misery altogether.
The Islamic Association of University
Students
Sharif University
of Technology
___________________________________________________________
English translation by ABF
