God bless the democracy in Iran
The results of the Competence Review, a procedure later added to the constitution based on which special governmental organizations specially the Guardian Council can review the competence of the election candidates and prevent the nominators decided ”incompetent” from being elected by the people, shows a breakdown for Iranian intellectual movement. This anti-democratic step took by the conservative front of the government will most probably cause a political deadlock for the Iranian democratic movement.
This situation is very similar to what happened after the election of Mahmood Ahmadinezhad, current president of Iran, when the intellectuals could basically do nothing to approach their goals for a democratic government. At that time, the intellectual movement split between two parts: reformists and the supporters of the downfall of the Islamic Republic government. Although these two groups never merged in spite of some efforts to reach the goal of a united intellectual movement, during the Reform Era, an era during which democrat reformists took charge of Iranian government and parliament, they sometimes fought for the same goals, and this decreased the size of the gap among them. After the reformists lost the Presidential election of 2006, supporters of downfall, also known as revolutionists, started to emphasize on the impossibility of reforming Islamic Republic government.
A group of reformists at that point remained on their former beliefs, and the other group started to split the reformist front little by little. In spite of all the problems reformists faced at the time, unsuccessful polices of the conservative president of Iran, Mahmood Ahmadinezhad, and the idea of retrying the passed way without the former mistakes made them try for the coming parliamentary elections of 2008. The saddening news of the massive rejection of their competence places the democratic movement of Iran again in a situation of political deadlock and incapability to take effective positions.
I, like a lot of other people, have no idea what is going to happen. I hope the situation will stay the same and won’t get worse because I know it is almost impossible to reach betterment in Iran at least in near future. I bet, hope is a better verb to describe what I intend to say, time will solve the problem we are facing right now.
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As long the system has unelected institutions it will never be democratic, whether president is a reformist or not. The only acceptable change is real and complete change. A change that will most likely will not come from election ballots.
Guardian Council is doing a great mistake, even with regards to supreme leader’s will. someone should wake them up.
Mohammad
How would you even consider the impossible, they need to age and pass away perhasp, in groups, because i don’t even think any one is ready to replace them.
Another disaster is on the way, when no one cares about!
When you ask people about this upcoming election, it seems that also no one would participate in and it makes the problems worse! Because there’s no motivation!
Damn this anti-democratic acts!
Lord,
Let the democracy be there then I guess G-d will decide to bless it, how would he bless the non-existing be3forehand? I mean he could but he wouldn’t
Lord, do you believe participation in this fake elections actually achieve something? I’d love to know what.
I believe that it is unlikely that there are many Iranians left, in the world, who are still delusional about this false hope in reforming Islamic Republic. By losing hope and not participating it seems to me that there will be more urge for a revolution (however unlikely).
If I am not mistaken, you posted about Bahai’s in Iran. Do you really think a reformist president in power of Islamic Republic will change the understanding of Islam (of I.R.) and the situation will be any better for such religious minorities?! C’mon, lets not kid ourselves.
Cheaper price of eggs under future Khatamis may make day to day life easier, but it is the suffering that wakes people up to stand up and say NO MORE!
In terms of repression, human rights abuses, and standard of living, would you say things are better or worse than they were under the Shah?
MyTwoCents:
in the case of repression and human rights abuses, one might hardly come up with a good guess: its absolutely a wrong idea to believe that one side is “clearly, certainly much worse than the other”, thus we need an accurate comparison which is alsmot impossible due to many reasons including:
(I) lack of reliable resources: the available data might be exaggerating in the case of Shah regime, and misleading or obscuring in the case of IRI. The opposie is possible as well: exaggerating about IRI, obscuring about Shah.
(II) lack of a comprehensive standard to compare two regimes: suppose that the number of executions is higher on one side, and the number of political prisoners sentenced to a life time prison is higher on the other side; which is worse? and so much more cases difficult to judge about.
in the case of “standards of living”, people now live a better life, for sure. but who contributed more to this ‘improvement’? again, its next to impossible to point to winner, I think. there has been a kind of gradual improvement in both periods. many factors, such as the number of hospitals per 100.000 population, show a fair increase in both periods. I think that Shah indeed tried to do a favor to his people, and IRI has contributed to progress as well; but who did it better? I do not know, neither those who express some naive ideas based on the hatred they feel about the either side.