TEHRAN - Post-election unrest has left three more dead, including one child, and two injured, across Iran, the evening daily newspaper Kayhan said Tuesday.

Two people were killed and two others injured in the first incident when a coach hired by supporters of one candidate passed through a village near the southern city of Lordeghan where the locals supported a rival candidate, the paper said.

The second incident happened in the village of Abriz near Sardasht in the north-west of the country, when a local man, ecstatic at his candidate's success, fired off gunshots, one of which went astray and fatally wounded a child.

A series of similar style incidents have been reported during the last three days in confrontations between supporters and opponents of local candidates.
 

They Are All Reformers Now, Even the Hangmen, The Independent, February 19

… The West has always consistently and willfully misunderstood Iran and we were at it again yesterday. The US government and, of course, the American press and CNN and all the usual suspects were billing the elections as a crucial struggle between "reformers" and "hardliners", a poll which could give President Khatami… a parliament that would at last break the power of the "conservatives", the "radicals", the "extremists"….

… Look at some of the men who now say they are… now calling themselves "reformers". Rafsanjani, Mohtashemi, Karroubi, the list is endless, all men from the past, a few of them - Mohtashemi comes to mind - with blood on their hands and a number of "pro-Khatamists" (not, mercifully, candidates) with blood all over them. Why, wasn't that friendly Ayatollah Khalkhali advocating reform this month the very same Ayatollah Khalkhali who… had hanged men like thrushes in Evin Prison, including a 14-year-old old boy who, he said, was not on his conscience because he had "sent him to heaven"?

And what of those stories now moving through the bazaars? In the decade up to 1998, so they say, up to 100 dissidents were "disappeared" in Iran… Wasn't Ali Akbar Mohtashemi an interior minister after the revolution? Wasn't Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani the president when all those men were put to death? And isn't that the same Rafsanjani who is now a "reformist", aching, no doubt, to become speaker of the new pro-Khatami parliament?

So what is this new parliament going to look like? It may call itself "reformist" but - like a cup of tea that is steadily mixed with coffee - it may end up as neither…
 

Daily: Establishment the Main Looser, Reuters, February 22

TEHRAN - Iranian conservatives said Tuesday the election victory by "reformers" will not bring sweeping policy changes.

Some conservatives reminded the public of the constitutional limits on parliament, and the primacy of religious laws as the backbone of the clerical state.

"The question is not who won or who lost. What happened is a blow to the whole establishment. We will soon learn the bitter truth that the main loser is the whole circle of the clergy and revolutionaries," the daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami said.
 

Opening Iran? The Boston Globe (Editorial), February 18

… Parliamentary elections in Iran cast light on the unique predicament of a country struggling to survive the misrule of a clerical theocracy…

Khatami… speaks of creating space for the flourishing of civil society, of constructing the rule of law, and of permitting young people and Iranian women to breathe free of the totalitarian controls imposed by zealous mullahs and their vigilantes.

Mikhail Gorbachev, in the Soviet Union, discovered that there could be no halfway house between democracy and the power system built by Lenin. Khatami and his supporters are launched upon a similar voyage. If they are to eliminate the corruption and incompetence of the mullahs who are strangling a statist economy, if they are to attract foreign investment and integrate Iran into the international community, sooner or later [they] will have to remove the hardliners from their commanding positions in the economy and the government.

This will not be easy. It is hard to imagine such a transformation being accomplished peaceably, through democratic means alone. Indeed, the current system allows no such change in the principle of rule by the supreme Islamic jurisprudent, Khamenei. As long as that principle holds, electoral exercises such as today's balloting serve as a safety valve to let off some of the steam of popular discontent, while preserving the power system built by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Back to Brief on Iran