TEHRAN, 21 February 2004 — Urged by prayer leaders to “slap America in the face”, Iranians voted yesterday in a disputed parliamentary election set to tighten the hard-liners’ grip on power and end President Mohammad Khatami’s faltering reform drive. A short, lackluster campaign was overshadowed by a ban on most reformist candidates and a crackdown on pro-reform media amid apparent public indifference. The main uncertainty concerns the turnout, with even the size of the electorate in dispute.
The Interior Ministry extended voting in 22 of Iran’s 28 provinces by four hours to 10 p.m. to accommodate late voters. Voting hours are often extended in Iran. In a sign that a boycott call by students and some reformist groups may have fallen on deaf ears, Reuters journalists saw dozens of people still queuing to vote at polling stations in central and southern Tehran late in the evening.
The official IRNA news agency said some areas of Tehran and the northwestern city of Tabriz had run out of ballot papers.
Supreme leader Ali Khamenei, among the first to cast his ballot, said the Islamic Republic’s enemies were trying to deter young people from voting.
“You see how those who are against the Iranian nation and the Islamic revolution are trying so hard to prevent people from going to the polls,” Khamenei told state television. Conservatives seem certain to dominate the new assembly after the Guardian Council, an unelected panel of hard-line clerics, disqualified 2,500 mainly reformist aspirants and a further 1,179 contenders withdrew.
Khatami voted at the Interior Ministry. In an oblique criticism of an election he has branded “unfair”, he told reporters: “This nation has been defeated many times but continued its path and created surprises.”
State media, controlled by the conservatives, pulled out all the stops to boost the turnout and legitimize the poll, broadcasting patriotic songs and old footage of revolutionary marches and mass voting in past elections.
Ahmad Jannati, head of the Guardian Council, used the main Friday prayer sermon in Tehran to attack the reformist parties and student groups shunning the poll, saying the boycott was “rooted in the palaces of America.”
“Those who whisper ‘don’t vote’ are traitors to the country and Islam,” he said. Some reformists say they fear a wave of arrests after the election.
Ahmad Amjadi, 42, a government employee in the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, said: “It is our religious duty to vote.”
“Iranians are united against the enemy and to slap the Americans’ face, we will vote,” he said.
Disenchantment with Khatami’s failure to achieve more during 7 years in office meant many of his previous supporters abstained. “Of course I’m not going to vote and I don’t think anyone else is. All of them (politicians) have only worked for themselves,” said war veteran Ali Asghar, a white-haired man with shrapnel lodged in his leg.
Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, whose surprise choice as winner of the 2003 peace prize shone a spotlight on the struggle for human rights in Iran, said this week she would not vote because people were not free to choose their representatives.
Foreshadowing a dispute over the turnout, the reformist-run Interior Ministry and the Guardian Council, which has the power to validate the results, issued conflicting figures for the size of the electorate.
The ministry said 46,351,032 Iranians aged 15 and over were entitled to vote. The Council said it was 43 million.
“The figure given by the Guardian Council on the number of voters in the country is incorrect,” the Interior Ministry said.
