Armies of the night

The fury of a million protestors may have already transformed Iran. But can their demands be fulfilled? A correspondent reports from Tehran. It is 10 o'clock at night in a district of modest, middle class apartment blocks in the centre of Tehran, and the people have gathered on their roofs to enjoy Iran's most dramatic political agitation for a quarter of a century. "Allahu Akbar!" yell a dozen people from the roof I am on, the women wearing either chador or coat and headscarf, the men in short-sleeve shirts. From the buildings around us, from buildings all over this capital city of eight million people, comes the echo, "Allahu Akbar!" With the help of this unanswerable statement of fact and allegiance, revolutionary Iranians put to flight the last Shah, back in 1979. With the same cry, they hope to be rid of a second unloved leader, their current president, the fiery populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad is being abused, mimicked and reviled here and in other towns around the country because he is regarded by millions of Iranians as the perpetrator of an intolerable fraud. On June 12, when Iran went to the polls, these millions were sure that their candidate, the reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a man as mild as Ahmadinejad is abrasive, a man who promised conciliation, not conflict, would win by a country mile. The massive street demonstrations in support of Mousavi, attended by millions in Tehran and elsewhere; the unofficial opinion polls; the shine in people's eyes; they told the same story, that Iran would soon have a new president.

But this, as the world knows, is not how things turned out. Just a few hours after the polls closed, early returns suggested that the incumbent had scored a massive victory. The following morning the interior ministry announced that Ahmadinejad had won 24 million votes to Mousavi's 13 million, out of a total of 39 million votes cast. The numbers were immediately denounced as false by Mousavi and his supporters, and by a second reformist candidate, a former parliament speaker called Mehdi Karroubi. Why, they asked, had reformist observers been expelled from many polling stations before counting began? Official claims that both reformist candidates had lost to Ahmadinejad in their respective home provinces seemed anomalous, to say the least, in this heavily tribal country. Equally questionable, in reformist eyes, was the ministry's contention that Ahmadinejad's vote had been uniformly high across this large and variegated country - even in provinces, such as Kurdistan, where the president is roundly disliked. Mousavi asked his supporters peacefully to protest against the election process, which he described as a "charade".

A week later, a week of astounding events, has turned Iran into a different place, a place of expanded horizons and, at the same time, ominous possibilities. On June 14, I was in a mammoth crowd, reckoned to number at least one-and-a-half million, which marched the length of Azadi Street, a broad boulevard that crosses south Tehran, demanding the election's annulment. Young people were a majority, but there were many families, too, and elderly people and the kind of traditional, chador-wearing housewife that one might expect to support the socially conservative Ahmadinejad. The march was self-policed - the security forces wisely absented themselves, although helicopters monitored events from the skies - and good-humoured. Slogans, witty and rhythmical and mercilessly derisive of the president, were conjured up, adopted by groups of marchers, and replaced by fresh ones. From a first floor balcony along the route, an old man held out a Quran as a kind of benediction, and a woman turned her garden hose on the marchers as relief from the heat. For many of the marchers, too young to remember the demonstrations of 1979, it was a moving and liberating experience to be part of a vast and unhindered gathering.

Among many Iranians, who have experienced a revolution, a catastrophic, eight-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and more recently the dull thud of George W Bush's hostility, the agitation has generated a welcome sense of optimism and solidarity. And daring; people who speak with scorn for their top elected politician are likely to be less forgiving of the political class in general, and more demanding of it, and this bodes well for the development of Iran's democracy.

At night, families in the residential suburbs of Tehran and other towns open their doors to young Mousavi supporters fleeing truncheon-wielding basijis, members of a highly ideological militia who prowl in search of "hooligans" - as the pro-Ahmadinejad media calls his opponents - to beat up. For the parents of young men who go out at night to burn rubbish bins, shout slogans and sound their car horns, their children's defiance is a source of worry, but also of pride. Many people have taken to wearing black, to mourn their "stolen" election-and, more recently, the lives that have been lost to Basij gunfire. Mousavi's supporters tie a green ribbon around their wrist - Mousavi is a seyyed, a descendent of the Prophet, and green is the colour of Islam. They hold up two fingers in the V-for-victory sign, and sing old revolutionary songs. These Iranians have a venerable culture of resistance to draw on, for their country's intermittent struggle for increased democracy started way before the 1979 revolution, at the beginning of the 19th century.

It is hard to predict how the current instalment will end. As one middle-aged man put it: "I meet my friends and we ask ourselves what will happen, and no one knows the answer." It is possible that a political solution is in the offing. The country's senior authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all matters of state, initially reacted by endorsing Ahmadinejad's victory. Now, five days into the crisis, he may be readying himself to make concessions to Mousavi. Khamenei has authorised the Council of Guardians, Iran's top oversight body, to review any evidence for fraud that the defeated candidates provide, and to recount votes where necessary. The council's spokesman has described the notion that the election may be re-held as "not implausible". But Mousavi and his entourage doubt the willingness of the council, itself the main overseer of the electoral process, to investigate irregularities. "I am not very optimistic about its judgment," Mousavi said on June 14. "Many of its members were not impartial during the election and supported the government candidate." Certainly, it would require considerable political will, and entail much embarrassment, for the council to revise the Ahmadinejad vote down to 49 per cent, necessitating a second round of voting involving the president and Mousavi. It is not clear whether this would be acceptable to Mousavi.

Even if the authorities do climb down, it is hard to imagine the president sitting on his hands. In Tehran and many other cities, Ahmadinejad does not boast the same levels of support as Mousavi, but twice since the crisis began he has succeeded in gathering tens of thousands of supporters into impressive victory rallies, and his tone is far from penitent. The president provoked the ire of Mousavi's supporters when he referred to them as "chaff" and "unimportant", and when he compared their emotions to the pique of a football supporter whose team has lost. On June 15 he was in Moscow, where he pronounced learnedly on the economic and political woes of the United States, without deigning to mention his own.

The possibility of a major confrontation - with or without the participation of the police, who have so far behaved with relative restraint - cannot be discounted. Although Ahmadinejad's support base is smaller than Mousavi's, his followers are more fanatical and better armed. On June 14, seven Mousavi supporters were killed during a confrontation with basijis who were firing from their barracks in south Tehran, and the speaker of parliament, no supporter of Mousavi, has demanded an inquiry into brutal raids that were staged on a dormitory at Tehran University and a residential block of flats. It is hard to say whether levels of violence are rising or not, since most of it goes unreported, particularly when it happens in provincial towns, but the confidence of Mousavi's supporters seems not to have been dented by the arrest of several leading reformists. Rather, it has been bolstered by the success of their monster rallies and the obvious reluctance of the authorities to use overwhelming and lethal force against them.

For those watching around the world, with fascination and horror, the drama is in the streets, but the resolution, if there is one, lies in the corridors of power. In the past, Khamenei has trodden a fine line between the demands of a young population and the need, as he sees it, to defend the core values of the Islamic Republic. Now, as never before, the two are in direct confrontation.