After a Day of Deadly Protests, Iran’s Guardian Council Admits Voting Irregularities Took Place in Presidential Election

Iran’s powerful Guardian Council has admitted that voting irregularities took place in at least fifty cities and that the number of votes cast exceeded the number of voters by a difference of as many as three million ballots. This comes as reformist presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi has called for another round of big street protests after a brutal crackdown this weekend. We speak to Iranian American independent filmmaker and journalist Kouross Esmaeli.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Iran’s powerful Guardian Council has admitted that voting irregularities took place in at least fifty cities and that the number of votes cast exceeded the number of voters by a difference of as many as three million ballots. But the head of the Guardian Council also insisted the discrepancies were not against Iranian law and countered charges that similar irregularities had occurred in 170 voting districts.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Ministry has accused Western governments of undermining Iran’s stability by backing protesters.

Reformist presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi has called for another round of big street protests after a brutal crackdown this weekend. Iranian state media reports that between ten and nineteen people were killed in clashes Saturday. One of those killed was an unarmed young woman named Neda Sultan, who was reportedly watching the protests with her father when she was shot by a member of the Basij. Graphic video of her death is circulating over the internet, and authorities have reportedly canceled memorial services for her at a mosque.

AMY GOODMAN: Iranian state radio reports 457 people were arrested on Saturday. According to Reporters Without Borders, some two dozen journalists and bloggers have been arrested since the protests began over a week ago, including, most recently, Newsweek reporter and filmmaker Maziar Bahari, a Canadian citizen.

This weekend’s clashes with security forces followed the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s stark warning Friday that demonstrators would face consequences if they continued to protest election results.

       AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI: [translated] Struggling on the streets after elections is not acceptable. It diminishes the electoral process and democracy. I call on all sides to put a stop to such actions. These are not correct actions. If they do not stop these actions, then any consequences will be their responsibility.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the situation in Iran, we’re joined here in our firehouse studio by Kouross Esmaeli. He is an Iranian American independent filmmaker and journalist and a part of the Big Noise Film collective. He has filed several reports from Iran over the last years for Al Jazeera English, Press TV and Current TV.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

KOUROSS ESMAELI: Good to be here, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the latest developments over the weekend.

KOUROSS ESMAELI: Well, the most important development over the weekend was, of course, the Supreme Leader’s Friday sermon, where he came down quite hard on the demonstrators and on the—and the reform movement that he said—that he claimed was going to be held responsible, if these disturbances continue. And he came down quite starkly, as well, for the election results, claiming that even if there were some discrepancies, as is natural in any election, the elections overall were fair, and they were proof of the Islam Republic’s continued quest for democracy and people’s sovereignty.

And that resulted in huge clashes on Saturday. People were not convinced by his words whatsoever. And the presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, in a response to the Friday sermon, encouraged people to continue to fight for their right to have free and fair elections. Saturday saw the highest number of casualties. By some numbers, it was called ten by the official news agencies, and some people have put a number at fifty. That’s as high as I’ve seen be reported.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, but in terms of the street protests, they don’t appear to be as massive as they were in the early days, right? A lot of it now is—are street battles that are occurring between protesters and either security forces or the Basij. Is there any sense that there will be more huge protests coming up this week?

KOUROSS ESMAELI: Well, on Saturday, the reason why the protests were not huge is because the security forces did a very good job of dividing the people who were trying to gather together at the Revolution Square, which is the place where usually these demonstrations happen. So it was an effective use of the military and the paramilitary forces that divided the crowds, and it dwindled into a riot situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the killings.

KOUROSS ESMAELI: Well, the killings—the official news agencies have said that at least seven were killed on that day. And the word is that the majority of the killing is being done by the Basij, by the paramilitary group that is un-uniformed and that has been within the Islamic Republic ever since the days of the Iran-Iraq War in the early ’80s.

By my accounts and by people who I’ve spoken to in the streets, the way that the killings have happened have been through knives, largely, which means basically that the Basij, which has lost its arms—in a few years ago, they asked the Basij to turn in their guns. So people know that the Basij carry knives and other form of ammunition with them. And that is the way the majority of the killings have happened.

The most famous killing, the killing that has become most sort of renown across the world, has been with Neda Sultan, who was killed by a sniper. And that could very well have been a Basij who had not turned in his guns, or it could have been done by—

AMY GOODMAN: This is the young woman.

KOUROSS ESMAELI: The young woman, who we showed.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was there with her father watching what was happening.

KOUROSS ESMAELI: Yes, yes. That could very well have been the official—the uniformed military forces in Iran.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, is there any indication—there have been some reports that there may be a rift developing between the regular army forces and the Basij or the other paramilitaries.

KOUROSS ESMAELI: From what I—there are rumors, and none of those have been confirmed, and no one that I’ve talked to has said that.

During the demonstrations the past week, there were instances where the demonstrators, who had done a very good job of protecting the police, they would disarm the police when they were—the police would come to attack them, but they would protect them. And there was an affinity that the crowd quickly made with the police. And there were stories that the police and the uniformed military was, at certain points, protecting the demonstrators from the un-uniformed or the Basij forces that might have attacked them. So, that did happen, and there were eyewitnesses that I’ve spoke to that actually saw that.

As far as a formal rift within the military, that has not been talked about yet. The formal rift right now is coming down within the leadership of the Islamic Republic. The way that the Supreme Leader has called for calm and called for everyone to accept the results of the elections has not been accepted by the leaders of the reform movement, and they continue to lobby within each other and to speak out openly about the elections not being fair and basically defying the Supreme Leader’s call for accepting the results.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this, the Guardian Council saying for the first time there may have been irregularities in the voting count?

KOUROSS ESMAELI: Well, I think what’s going to happen in the following weeks, the Guardian Council and the leadership of the Islamic Republic is going to put out more and more numbers, that that’s going—that they’re going to try to calm down the protesters, to say, “Yes, we see that there were problems. We’re going to look into them. Just please, let’s all look at this within a legal framework.”

Ali Larijani, who’s the head of the Parliament, who’s one of the most senior conservative politicians in Iran, he had a very important interview with state television yesterday in which he basically criticized the Guardian Council for seeming as if they’re supporting one candidate over another. And criticizing the Guardian Council is next to criticizing the Supreme Leader for siding with the one of the candidates against the other. So this came out openly on Iranian television. And so, there are these voices that are trying to bring calm and sanity and trying to be critical from all sides at this point. And there’s reports right now from the parliamentary website for—that Larijani is trying to get an interview with Mousavi himself on national Iranian television.

AMY GOODMAN: Kouross, we’re going to break. When we come back, we want to play for you what Obama said over the weekend, what the President said, the right-wing criticism of him that he should be acting more, the arrest of Rafsanjani’s daughter, very significant, and more. This is Democracy Now! We’re speaking with Kouross Esmaeli. He is an Iranian American independent filmmaker. Stay with us.