The issue is really not the backing of Moussavi – it is the fact that the young want to be part of the world and know that the 21st century has things to offer them that their country’s leadership tries to take away from them. They really want freedom and if given the chance could provide for Iran the needed new leadership.

Earlier Monday, Ayatollah Khamenei stepped in to try to calm a growing backlash, forcing him into a public role he generally seeks to avoid as the country’s top religious authority. Under Iran’s dual system of government, with civil and religious institutions, the supreme leader can usually operate in the shadows while elected officials serve as the public face of governance and policy.

He called for the Guardian Council to conduct an inquiry into the opposition’s claims that the election was rigged and then had that announcement repeated every 15 minutes on Iranian state radio throughout the day. It was a rare reversal.

On Sunday he met with Mr. Moussavi, a moderate, to listen to his concerns. And on Monday, he promised the inquiry into the results.

Nevertheless, his announcement could not calm the anger of the people. There was so much distrust that some people said they believed the leader was just trying to buy time and to calm the crowds, rather than attempting to really investigate the outcome.

“These people are not seeking a revolution,” said Ali Reza, a young actor in a brown T-shirt who stood for a moment watching on the rally’s sidelines. “We don’t want this regime to fall. We want our votes to be counted, because we want reforms, we want kindness, we want friendship with the world.”

Mr. Moussavi, who had called for the rally on Sunday but never received official permission for it, joined the crowd, as did Mohammad Khatami, the reformist former president. But the crowd was so vast, and communications had been so sporadic — the authorities have cut off phone and text-messaging services repeatedly in recent days — that many marchers seemed unaware they were there.

“We don’t really have a leader,” said Mahdiye, a 20-year-old student, who like many protesters declined to give a last name because of fears of repercussions. “Moussavi wants to do something, but they won’t let him. It is dangerous for him, and we don’t want to lose him. We don’t know how far this will go” – report the New York Times correspondents.

It was too soon to tell whether Ayatollah Khamenei’s decision to launch an inquiry, or the government’s decision to let the silent rally proceed, would change the election results. Many in the crowd said they believed that officials expected the protests to dissipate, as smaller protest movements did in 1999 and 2003.

“People feel really insulted, and nothing is worse than that,” said Azi, a 48-year-old woman in a yellow headscarf who participated in the massive rally on Monday. “We won’t let the regime buy time, we will hold another march tomorrow.”

At nightfall, large numbers of people in Tehran took to their roofs for a second night, chanting “God is great!” and “Death to the dictator!” in neighborhoods across the city. The Associated Press, quoting residents, also reported that shooting was also heard in three districts of wealthy northern Tehran.

In Moscow, meanwhile, an official at the Iranian Embassy said that Mr. Ahmadinejad had delayed a visit to Russia that was to have started Monday. The meeting, in Yekaterinburg, is of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China and four Central Asian countries. Reuters reported that he arrived on Tuesday.

————

Democracy could still win in Iran.
By Gideon Rachman
The Financial Times, June 15 2009.

Thirty years after the Iranian revolution, could we be witnessing an Iranian counter-revolution? In the short term, events in Iran are depressing and alarming – a stolen election, violence in the streets, repression. In the long term, the weekend has provided heartening evidence that Iran, and the Middle East in general, need not be immune to the great wave of democratisation that has swept the world since the late 1970s.

Of course, there are those who think that – despite the turmoil in Tehran – President Mahmoud Ahamdi-Nejad may actually have won the election. Their line of argument is that western journalists and middle-class Iranians have been deceived by focusing too much on opinion in the capital city and amongst the educated elite. Iran might be like Thailand – a country that has recently been through political turmoil because the urban middle-classes are regularly out-voted by the rural poor.

These arguments are unconvincing. The Iranian election bears all the hallmarks of a stolen vote. The official count has Mr Ahmadi-Nejad winning even in the home town of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, his main challenger. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad is said to have won even in Azeri-speaking constituencies, despite the fact that Mr Moussavi comes from an Azeri background. The official tally gave Mr Ahmadi-Nejad 63 per cent of the vote, which is way out of line with most pre-election predictions. The Iranian regime has reacted to popular protests with all the instincts of a dictatorship – beating up protesters, locking up opponents, shutting down text messaging services and internet sites.

In retrospect, the Iranian revolution of 1979 replaced one despotic regime with another – and so cut the country off from the democratising forces that were just beginning to make themselves felt throughout much of the rest of the world.

It used to be said that Iran was a rare example of a semi-democracy in the Middle East. But the weekend elections have ripped away the country’s democratic veil.

During the 1980s most of the Latin American authoritarian regimes were swept away. Democracy came to the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s – and to central Europe in 1989. In the 1990s apartheid fell in South Africa and so did the Suharto regime in Indonesia.

In recent years, the global democratic revolution has threatened to run out of steam. Russia has slipped backwards towards authoritarianism and China has made the case for a new form of enlightened one-party rule. The chaos that followed the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has threatened to discredit the whole case for democratisation.

Some conservative realists have argued that it is, in any case, a mistake to promote democracy in the Middle East, since Islamists are liable to win power and impose illiberal regimes. The joke has been that it would be “one man, one vote, one time”. The best response to this has always been that Islamism is only likely to lose its popular allure when Muslim fundamentalists are allowed to govern – and prove themselves to be incompetent, oppressive and corrupt.

That cycle is now playing itself out in Iran. Even if Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and his cohorts succeed in clinging on to power, their claim to represent a popular Islamic revolution is now in shreds.

***

In the meantime, how should the outside world react to Iran’s stolen election? The Obama administration has already been criticised for what some conservatives regard as an excessively mild and cautious response to events in Iran.

But heavy-handed intervention by the west would be mistaken at this stage. The Iranian regime has three possible sources of domestic legitimacy: popular support, economic success or an external threat. The economy is doing badly and the stolen election has wrecked the idea that this is a government that rests on a broad popular mandate.

That leaves the possibility that the regime will use the bogeyman of foreign intervention to rally patriotic support and to crack down even harder on the opposition. There is a history of western meddling in Iranian politics – for example the US-backed coup of 1953, acknowledged by President Barack Obama in his recent speech in Cairo. So an appeal by the regime to rally all patriotic Iranians against foreign intervention might resonate.

The crucial lesson of the long wave of democratisation that has rolled round the world since 1979 is that democratic revolutions ultimately succeed for almost entirely domestic reasons. Occasionally, outsiders can influence events. The Russian decision not to intervene in 1989 was obviously crucial to the success of the democratic revolutions in central Europe. America’s decision to spirit away Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 clinched the “people power” revolution in the Philippines.

But these were client regimes. In most cases, democratic revolutions have been driven overwhelmingly by “people power” at home – usually followed by a loss of nerve or cracks in the ruling regime. This might yet happen in Iran.

It is still possible that the country will have a successful “Green” revolution to match the Orange and Rose revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. But the sad truth is that all the outside world can do, for the moment, is offer rhetorical support for Iranian democrats, watch, wait and hope.

 gideon.rachman at ft.com