Fake election, real threats

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Iran's people face yet another faked election today, with eight candidates for president, all hand-picked by the regime, facing off in a tragic parody of democracy.

The parody is obvious. Hundreds of other candidates were disqualified well before the vote by the Council of Guardians, including every single woman who sought to run. The council of 12 radical clerics, desperate to maintain the clergy's absolute rule, was careful to allow only candidates they could count on to toe the line if elected.

Whoever wins Friday, the regime wins. At least, that's how the mullahs have it figured.

The tragic side of this Friday's elections can be felt in the Iranian people's desire for freedom, and their mounting frustration with the indifference of the international community, including the U.S., to their appeals for help.

Two weeks ago outside Paris, I spoke with Abolhassan Banisadr, the Islamic Republic's first (and only) freely elected president. Deposed in a coup in 1981, he has been a target of assassination by regime hit teams ever since.

Mr. Banisadr told me regime internal tracking polls, leaked to his supporters, showed the regime's own Interior Ministry expected voter turnout to be about 27 percent. Mr. Banisadr is urging his supporters inside Iran to boycott the elections.

In Tehran, where anti-regime protests have erupted all week, a scant 5 percent turnout is expected. As Iranians realize the mullahs have no intention of allowing elections to infringe on their absolute power, calls for a massive boycott have come from virtually all factions of the Iranian opposition.

Groups that normally oppose each other, from monarchists to the center-left National Front, have joined together in calling for a boycott.

Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of Iran's Revolutionary Guards who became disenchanted with the regime and has been jailed twice for speaking out against clerical rule, has called on Western governments not to recognize any government issued from these elections. If the elections are illegitimate, he told me in Washington last month, anyone who comes to power through them also will be illegitimate.

But the mullahs have a scheme. Sunday, bombs killed 10 persons in Ahwaz and Tehran. The regime blames opposition groups, but pro-democracy advocate Sardar Haddad tells me the regime has a record of staging violence to further its ends.