Rajavi: With final results announced, mullahs' elections turn out to be a flop

Following the announcement of election results for mullahs' Majlis in Tehran at 2 am (local time) a week after the voting, and ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani becoming the last of the 30 candidates who won seats in Tehran, Mr. Massoud Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said: The mullahs' Supreme Leader (Ali Khamenei) had been paving the way and making preparation for months to make Rafsanjani the next Speaker of the Majlis and thereby preclude a second term in office for Khatami.

Mr. Rajavi added: Khatami and his faction, however, saw Rafsanjani's presence in the Majlis and the prospects of his assuming the Speaker's seat as a big problem and even a political noose around their necks. So they were determined to capitalize on the public antipathy toward Rafsanjani, who had been recently targeted in a Resistance mortar attack, and bar him from entering the Majlis by pointing out the rigging and cheating that had been carried out in his favor. The delays and procrastinations of the past week were caused by an intense backstage infighting centered on Rafsanjani's entry to the Majlis.

In the heat of the fray, Khamenei is said to have issued a serious threat that if Tehran's election results were not made public by Saturday morning, the Council of Guardians would declare election results throughout the capital null and void on the basis of widespread rigging. In the past few days, the mullahs' factions have exposed numerous cases of cheating and rigging and electoral fraud.

Mr. Rajavi referred to some of the cheating and fake votes revealed in the mullahs' newspapers and said: The Interior Minister announced immediately after the elections that "about 33 million people took part in the elections and there was an 85 percent turnout." (Jomhouri-Islami daily, February 24, 2000). But the Interior Ministry climbed down from its original claims by six million votes and announced this morning that 26.8 million people voted. In a similar vein, the Interior Ministry's Director general for elections declared on February 21 that "3.2 million people voted in Tehran." This morning, however, he scaled down that figure to 2.9 million.

The NCR President said: The aggravating power struggle and growing rift between the ruling factions at the top of the mullahs' regime made a farce of the elections in this illegitimate regime and exposed the masquerade that the mullahs were passing off as elections. The "epic of February 18" - as they called it - turned out to be a flop and burst like a bubble.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
February 26, 2000


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