Iran Leaders Will Stop Poll Protests, Says Columbia’s Bulliet By Henry Meyer
June 15 (Bloomberg) -- Iranian leaders will probably take decisive action to quell opposition protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, said Richard Bulliet, an Iran expert at Columbia University. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated today in downtown Tehran at a rally led by Ahmadinejad’s defeated opponent, Mir Houssein Mousavi, who charges widespread fraud in the June 12 vote. A pro-government militia fired at opposition protesters, killing at least one person, the Associated Press reported, citing one of its photographers, who was a witness. There was no immediate confirmation. The rally took place in defiance of an official ban on public protests. “The regime will quell the discontent,” Bulliet, a professor of history at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, said by phone today from New York. “It will be dampened down and the U.S. and foreign governments will have to resign themselves to dealing with the Ahmadinejad regime.” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who endorsed Ahmadinejad’s election June 13, calling it a “glittering event,” has ordered an investigation into allegations of irregularities. Bulliet predicted that the Guardian Council, the election’s supervisory body, with the authority to review the results, will still endorse the outcome within the next week. Repercussions Predicted If the protests continue after then, “Khamenei could respond to street unrest by declaring martial law and imposing curfews,” he said. Ahmadinejad, 52, took almost 63 percent of the vote, according to official results, with Mousavi winning about 34 percent. Mousavi, 67, said today he’s ready to take part in new elections. A victory by Ahmadinejad would be a setback for President Barack Obama’s policy of engaging Iran in dialogue, rather than ostracizing it, as a means to ensure the Islamic republic doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons, said analysts including Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Iranian president, accused by Mousavi and other opponents of stoking tensions with the West with his fiery rhetoric, has rejected international concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. Mousavi, a former prime minister, had promised in the campaign to respond to Obama’s efforts to end three decades of hostility between their countries following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He also pledged unspecified confidence-building measures to reassure the international community about the peaceful nature of Iranian nuclear activities. Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, says its atomic work is designed to generate electricity. To contact the reporter on this story: Henry Meyer in Dubai at [email protected].
