Election, Monitored: The tragic farce of voting in Iran
The last time that most of the world peered inside Iran was in June, 2009, when, for two searing weeks, the Islamic Republic cracked open. In what came to be known as the Green Movement, a series of mass protests contested the official results of the Presidential election, which granted a second term to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has held the office since 2005. The Basij, a state-sponsored militia, crushed the demonstrations; photographs and furtive cell-phone footage captured young people in green fleeing down broken sidewalks, motorcycles at their heels. By the time of the Arab Spring, in early 2011, Ahmadinejad’s election-year rivals, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, had been placed under house arrest, their mid-level operatives imprisoned and forced to confess on television to international conspiracy, their movement dubbed fetneh—“the sedition.” As the regime silenced the country’s internal press and shunned Western reporters, the world lost sight of Iran’s domestic life and focussed instead on its nuclear program.
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