Fallout from the Iranian Elections: The Protests and the Crackdowns

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In wake of the recent Iranian elections, wherein current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won with 62% of the vote (running against 3 other candidates), sparked a massive protest in Iran, where supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi, Ahmadinejad's most popular rival, claim that the election results were fixed. In fact, Moussavi's website supposed posted the "true" election results, which claims that Moussavi won with 57% of the vote. I have a link to the his site, but it's in Arabic, so I can't verify the numbers off of that page, I'm just going off of a translation form someone on another forum I go to.

What isn't in question is that the protest was huge.




The government response was harsh. There are reports that Universities, hotbeds for support for Moussavi, was attacked by militia loyal to Ahmadinejad. Twitter Change_For_Iran links to some photographic proof Warning: Some pictures at the link are graphic in nature.

This site has photos from throughout the day. Be warned that several of the pictures near the bottom of the page are graphic.

For a good part of the day, the only way to follow this story was on Facebook or Twitter, as the Iranian government has cracked on down media outlets, including jamming satellite transmissions in a attempt to muzzle the international media. Of course, that didn't work. The protesters have been using Facebook and Twitter to organize themselves, so much so that Twitter rescheduled a maintenance downtime so that it happened in the middle of the night Iranian time. Searching #iranelection on Twitter will get you a lot of results, but according to the forum I got this information from, this is one of the most reliable Twitters at the event, and many of this comments have since been verified by professional news reports.

Of course, now there is plenty of media coverage of the event, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called for a investigation into the election. However, Khamenei has already declared that the results are valid, and the council he called upon to investigation the claims...the Guardian Council, I believe...is half-populated by people selected by Khamenei, so it's uncertain if any serious investigation will actually take place.

Moussavi has called for a general strike to happen throughout Iran tomorrow, according to Twitter.

Lots of pictures here
Recording of one of the protests.
fivethirtyeight breaks down some "fishy" results.
MSNBC reports that election results were announced "in a matter of hours", which some are calling suspicious seeming as election officials would of had to count almost 40 million paper ballots in those few hours.

Long story short: There's some serious stuff going down in Iran right now. Several news stories I've seen have compared the events of today with the Iranian Revolution and Tienanmen Square. Most newsites I've visited have this as their headline story, so you might want to hunt down information for yourself since, admittedly, a lot of my information is unconfirmed from Twitter.