Iran election
On 14 March, parliamentary elections took place in Iran. From all evidences, it is clear that the election was a phoney one which has been stage managed by the Shia Mullahs to tighten their grip on power. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who came to power in 2005 on a populist platform that promised a better life for Iran's poor, has, three years later, failed to deliver. Despite Iran's enjoying a boom from rising oil prices, unemployment and poverty remain extremely high, while the government has been diverting funds for military and nuclear energy. If discontent over the economy is the only visible sign of opposition to the Iranian state, it is because all other forms of opposition, be they political, ideological, and religious or social, have been brutally silenced. In fact, the tyranny under Iran's Shia Mullahs has replaced the tyranny under Shah. Both the tyrannies share many things in common. A recent case study will make the point clear. Soreya Malekzadeh, a lecturer at Tehran University, wanted to test the Iranian regime's claim to be an open democracy, so she submitted her nomination paper to be a candidate for this month's parliamentary elections. Now, exhausted by state harassment and imprisonment, she has submitted another set of papers, this time to the Canadian Embassy in Tehran in the hope of obtaining refugee status. Talking to the Toronto Star reporter, George McLeod, Malekzadeh describes her failed bid to run in Iran's election. Visibly exhausted from years of run-ins with the authorities, Malekzadeh says her vocal stance on women's issues in Iran has left her with little choice but to leave. "I have lost almost everything, my job, my future," she says. "Women can't do anything in this country. The government tells us how to dress and what we say." Her first run-in with the Mullahs was in 2004 when she published an article on women's rights in a reformist newspaper. The article argued that women deserve equal status in Iran and should be allowed to dress as they like. After the publication of the article, she was slapped with a 15-day prison sentence. Malekzadeh's story is not unique. As Iran headed to polls on March 14, hundreds of candidates deemed critical of the Mullah-led government have been blacklisted while dissident newspapers and journalists have been silenced. Iran's Mullahcracy is the very antithesis of democracy.
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