Politics: Green Revolution (?)

About a week ago, I wrote a blog entry that I was unfortunately unable to post entitled "Politics: Green Revolution" about the waves and waves of support for Moussavi in Tehran. I alluded to it briefly in my last post, and though I'm unfortunately still unable to upload videos and pictures it deserves a lot more discussion according to recent events.

This morning at 7:30 when my mom woke me up, my first mumbled sentences was: "Who won?" The reply: "Ahmadinejad." I spent breakfast listening to my cousing lament and quote the outcomes (what I've heard reported here is 64% Ahmadinejad, 32% Moussavi, 2% Rezai, and less than 1% Karroubi) and the afternoon listening to the rest of my family lament the "democracy" in Iran and get angry about the obvious taqqalob, or cheating. What I've heard most often is that the Rahbar (Supreme Leader) hand-picked Ahmadinejad anyway, that it was obvious that they would cheat and that they themselves would have to suffer for four more years.

In the teeny little town of Maragheh, in northwestern Iran, Ahmadinejad supporters are out in the street. But in Tehran and other bigger towns, it's chaos. BBC Persia was showing beatings in the street and huge protests (like a river, my cousin said, they kept flowing). What I found interesting is that unlike the campaigning I wanted to post about earlier, these protests are taking place on foot. People are not hiding behind their steering wheels or zooming around on motorcycles. Instead of the "Ahmadi bye-bye!" chants (and many, many more clever ones that I'll remember to post soon), the young crowd was shouting:

Moussavi, Moussavi, ray-e ma ra pass bedee!
(Moussavi, Moussavi, return our votes!)

BBC Persia was sharing cell-phone videos of the violence and numverous angry emails asking where Moussavi is to lead his supporters against the regime. The latest news from BBC was that the vote is to be re-done. My family, at least, is not hopeful that this will happen or necessarily change anything, since after all the hope they had for a runoff between Moussavi and Ahmadinejad was crushed. But since even the government censored newspapers had been reporting numbers more like 47% Ahmadinejad and 40% Moussavi (I'll cite my dad here since my reading in Farsi isn't developed enough for me to have read the newspaper myself), it seems unlikely that the powers that be will be able to get away with such bold-faced lie.

Unfortuntely and unusually, the (illegally) satellite-broadcast BBC Persia is not coming through. Could the government have a hand in it? Possibly--they seem to have a handle on everything else. I can't wait to get back to Tehran and have more of a hand in it than dipping my finger in blue ink to cast my vote.