Iran after the elections: 22 June 2009

I was just about to start looking for information on this when Press TV has turned up exactly what I was looking for - thanks to Rezaei we now know that over 100% of eligible voters somehow managed to vote in over 50 cities. The reason why Rezaei is so important here is that he was apparently given the smallest vote total of the four, making it much easier to prove the numbers wrong as he simply has to find more IDs of people that voted for him than election monitors claim actually did. Rezaei has proven to be an interesting thorn in the side of Ahmadinejad this whole time, and without appearing to be doing anything disloyal either (he even attended Khamenei's speech on the 19th for example).

Nate Silver also has a post on this subject.

Here's the video of police running away on the 20th in embeddable form now.

Battle w/ Police - Tehran, Iran - June 20th 2009
Uploaded by mightier-than. - News videos from around the world.

One other interesting thing to note is that since the election a number of major services have stepped up their Persian-language support (Google and Facebook in particular), and a lot of people have 1) realized that Iranians are not one-dimensional caricatures and 2) started to acquire an interest in the language too. The reason why this is important is because the authorities in Iran can't keep blocks going forever, as not having access to major sites, news, SMS service and all the rest is a detriment to the economy, but as soon as those open up again it may make it that much easier to plan protests and strikes, and inform the outside world of what's going on. It's a big dilemma for them.

Andrew Sullivan has found an interesting (very clumsily-made) propaganda film from 2008 illustrating just how the government in Iran tries to get its citizens to view the outside world. It's also a great link to bookmark for those learning the language.



BBC Persian has another video of a showdown from yesterday here in central Tehran. Not sure what happened after that first two minutes.

Many tweets in Persian are referencing Mousavi's most recent sixth statement, especially the part that "it is your right to protest against lies and cheating":

I've tweeted that as well (Persian + English) so you can RT that if you want.


There are a lot of tweets in Persian now about a general strike planned for Tuesday, with some saying to stock up before then. A lot are also talking about a general strike that day in Kurdistan (the area in northwest Iran where the majority of the people are Kurds) that you can see automatically translated here. This is something I've noticed in the Turkish press as well such as in articles like this one (automatically translated here), where the belief is that an increased crackdown from the government would result in a revolt in the Kurdish-dominated area in the northwest.

This one:
says "Tuesday has been declared as a general strike across Iran". And this one:

says "Call for civil institutions and political and civil activists in Kurdistan: general strike in Kurdistan on Tuesday!"