The Lonely War: One Woman's Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran by Nazila Fathi

Author:Nazila Fathi [Fathi, Nazila]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780465040926
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

REFORM

I voted for the first time in my life on May 23, 1997, at the age of twenty-six. I had gone to a polling station with Scott McLeod of Time magazine to cover the presidential elections but took advantage of being there to cast a ballot myself.

After waiting in line with Scott by my side, I took out my birth certificate—a red jacketed booklet like a passport—and handed it to an election official to get a ballot in return. I wrote “Mohammad Khatami” in my clearest handwriting, folded the ballot, and dropped it in a large white box.

The Islamic Republic has long boasted that it is a democracy and derives its legitimacy from the vote of the people. It holds separate elections for Parliament and president at regular four-year intervals. At that time, Iranians could vote starting at age fifteen, and elections are always on a Friday, the weekend day, so that more people can go to the polls. Still, this being Iran, there are limits to what is allowed in these ostensibly free elections. For instance, not everyone who wants can run in the elections; the regime vets each candidate and bars the majority from participating.

After we walked out of the polling station, I called my sister on my cell phone. “Goli,” I said. “Hurry. The polling stations are starting to get busy. You may end up having to wait in line.”

My sister replied that she was waiting for my father to get ready. “I don’t think he’ll vote if I don’t take him with me,” she told me.

I hung up and called my mother. An early riser, she’d already voted. It was the first time she—as well as my father—had voted since the 1979 referendum that Ayatollah Khomeini held to determine the shape of the post-revolution government. He had given voters the option of choosing “yes” or “no” to the question of whether Iran should have an Islamic republic, explaining that the difference between it and a republic was that there was no tyranny in an Islamic republic. My parents were among a few of their friends who had voted no. Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime claimed over 99 percent of the country voted yes. Years later, however, former officials would acknowledge that the regime had tampered with the votes.

That day, Scott and I drove around Tehran to check the polling stations. Lines had begun appearing by eleven am. Young and old, women in chador or in headscarves that revealed their hair, all waited, clasping their birth certificates. I had never seen such crowds.

To get a sense of how people were voting, we stood outside the stations to conduct exit interviews. Most people told us that they were first-time voters and were voting for Khatami, just as I had. The cleric whom Zanan had quoted as demanding that Iranian universities increase their rosters of female faculty, Khatami combined a respectable religious background with outspoken progressivism that made him seem to many like the most electable of all the candidates on the ballot.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.