Iranian hard-liners on course for election victory

Torn between a reformist boycott and calls by conservatives to cast each vote as “a slap to America’s face,” Iranians voted today in elections expected to return the nation’s parliament to Islamic hard-liners.

With thousands of reform candidates disqualified, the drama was more about how many votes will be cast for the 290 seat parliament than who would win the election.

As the time approached for polls to close, voting was extended for one hour in most provinces as permitted under election laws and in what could be an attempt by hard-liners to ensure the highest possible turnout.

Boycott backers used e-mail, Web sites and a blitz of mobile phone text messages to appeal to voters, pressing a protest called after clerics banned 2,400 liberals from running for office.

The main web site of the Islamic Participation Front, the biggest reformist group, appeared blocked by state-imposed filters.

With the ballot weighted with hard-liners almost certain to win, turnout was being watched carefully as a test of public sentiment. Iran’s hard-line clerical leadership was seeking a significant turnout to demonstrate its enduring strength 25 years after the Islamic Revolution.

Reformists’ strength in a nation with so many young voters – about half of Iran’s 65 million people are under 25 – is also being measured. They hope young people will heed their complaint that clerics rigged the vote to regain the legislative control they lost four years ago for the first time since 1979.

“The lower the numbers, the bigger the reformers’ silent victory,” said political analyst Davoud Hermidas Bavand.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the country’s top political and religious authority – voted about 30 minutes after polling stations opened.

“You see how those who are against the Iranian nation and the revolution are trying so hard to prevent people from going to the polls,” Khamenei said in Tehran. “I do not think these enthusiastic young people will be prevented from fulfilling their duty.”

President Mohammad Khatami, who bowed to pressure from clerics and urged a large turnout, was grim-faced as he voted.

“Whatever the result of the elections, we must accept it,” he said at a polling station.

There were no immediate reports violence. More than 46 million people aged 15 and over are eligible to vote, but it was difficult to independently gauge turnout.

Some Tehran polling stations were virtually empty, but other areas around the country reported a steady flow of voters. Iranians voted at mosques, desert outposts for nomads and even cemeteries for those making the traditional weekly visit to graves.

Reformers hope voter participation falls by at least half in their urban strongholds including the capital, Tehran. Parliament elections in 2000 attracted more than 67% of voters nationwide and almost 47% in Tehran province.

The liberal candidates blacklisted by the conservative theocracy included the core ranks of reformist activists and politicians demanding ruling clerics cede some of their almost limitless powers.

More than half of the 5,000 names on the ballot are hard-liners and only 200 were pro-reformists.

Conservatives responded to the reformist boycott with the full power of state media: non-stop radio and television coverage with pro-vote comments from citizens and leaders and claims of a massive turnout. At a mosque in central Tehran, loudspeakers broadcast voting appeals.

Hard-line-controlled state television broadcast a stream of comments from people saying that voting would show Iran’s defiance against “enemies” - meaning the United States to most conservatives.

“We can gouge out the eyes of the enemy,” one man in northern Iran told state TV. “Each vote is like a slap to America’s face.”

At one polling station in Tehran, about 20 conservative girls, all wearing black chadors, waited to vote. “I’m voting for the first time,” said 16-year-old Sara Nazari. ”This is a very important moment for the country.”

At a mosque in an upmarket section of Tehran, just four voters came over a half hour in late afternoon – including one who said his father forced him to vote. At the same time, more than 30 people voted at a site in a more conservative district near the Tehran bazaar.

At both places, the turnout appeared lighter than during presidential elections in 2001, according to local journalists.

State television included an English-language news scroll in an apparent effort to persuade foreign journalists that turnout was huge.

A landslide win in elections four years ago gave reformists a majority in parliament. But all attempts at significant changes to the Islamic state were blocked by the non-elected clerical authorities led by Khamenei – whose backers consider him answerable only to God.

Billboards and pamphlets carried statements from the leader of the 1979 revolution, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, equating voting with patriotism.

“Some people are whispering not to vote. They are traitors to Islam and the country,” Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati told worshippers at Friday prayers at Tehran University.

Jannati leads the powerful, Khamenei-appointed Guardian Council, which banned the pro-reform candidates.

The last major pro-reform newspapers in Tehran were banned Thursday by the hard-line judiciary.

The two dailies – Yas-e-nou and Sharq – published portions of a statement from pro-reform MPs attacking Khamenei and saying freedom was being “trampled in the name of Islam.”

Judiciary agents also searched and closed an election monitoring office of the Islamic Participation Front. The group’s headquarters, however, continued operating.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, one of Iran’s most influential reform figures, said she would stay away because most of the well-known liberal candidates were banned.

Speaking in Rome, she predicted a hard-liner victory ”will not be rosy.”