Freedom in Iran: Do they truely have a voice?

The people of Iran had wanted to overthrow the Shah and his dictatorship and bring democracy to their country. They had wanted change. Then, the clergymen had stood up offering to run the country they had always dreamt of. They asked the people of Iran if they wanted and Islamic republic or not. The people apparently chose the Islamic republic and it was established after the constitution was written. The clergymen then took their place. Based on the constitution, there always needed to be a supreme leader and so one was established. Little by little, they started to take the freedom away from people while taking advantage of their positions.

For many years the Presidential Elections had been going well. The preceding president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami, had supported the citizens of Iran and mostly ran a true democracy. After he was in office for two terms, it was time for the Presidential Elections. In Iran, there is a guardian council who determine who can be candidates for president. They have the power to dismiss the people they don’t approve of, and the people don’t think the same way as they do. This is a limiting factor in the voting process. The people of Iran can therefore only vote for the candidates that they guardian council liked and approved of.

The election day had been a complete mockery. The citizens had been voting for someone who was with the people and wanted to correct the laws. Seeing this, the supreme leader had dismissed everyone on his council and chose the president, giving the citizens the illusion that they had a voice. The election was then capped and, in a time too short for it to be possible that the votes were counted, the clergymen came to the conclusion that the president would be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was not who the people had been voting for. The people saw that there had been irregularities in the voting process. The government wouldn’t listen to the opposition and wouldn’t pay attention.

To this day, the clergymen have been eliminating (imprisoning) reporters, students, professors, thinkers, and journalists who have tried to surface the truth behind the head of the country. People are determined to fight without violence. What the Iranian people got, was worse than what they had.

Images HERE and HERE