A world away, calls of fraud echo

On Saturday, Iranian election officials declared a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad in a vote that had been projected to be a close battle between reformers and incumbent hard-liners.

Iran's state-owned news agency had named Ahmadinejad the victor shortly after polls closed Friday after nearly 30 million Iranians voted, making some suspect the results were fraudulent. When the news broke, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was the leading reform candidate and who also claimed victory, rejected the results and protests broke out across central Tehran.

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a visiting scholar at the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a former member of the Iranian parliament, said the international community needs to "condemn the election" and should not recognize Ahmadinejad as the president.

"If this were real, why did they arrest members of the opposition parties? If there was no fraud, why the massive arrests? You can see this is sort of a coup d'etat," said Haghighatjoo as she stood on Brattle Street with demonstrators, many carrying signs.

Demonstrators said yesterday's protest had no official organizers and information on the event had spread through word of mouth, e-mail, and Facebook. Seven of the 13 demonstrators interviewed declined to have their names published, saying that they feared retribution from the Iranian government.

Holding signs saying "Election Fraud in Iran" and "Where is our vote?" protesters began gathering outside the Harvard Square subway station on Brattle Street around 11 a.m. By 12:30 p.m., about 100 protesters were lining both sides of Brattle Street at the intersection with John F. Kennedy Road. The group chanted "Where is our vote?" as passing cars honked and participants handed out fliers to passers-by.

Holding a sign that said, "THIS WAS A COUP D'ETAT NOT AN ELECTION IN IRAN," Farah Barazandeh said that although she voted for Ahmadinejad, the allegations are concerning.

"If there was cheating on the people's vote, it's not democracy," said Barazandeh, 60, of Boston. "I'm not sure whether they cheated, but if they did, it's not the correct way."

Saying that she would "respect the people's vote" if a candidate other than Ahmadinejad was elected, Barazandeh urged the Iranian government to recount the votes to ensure the validity of the results.

The game of politics is different in the Middle East, said an Iranian doctor who lives here now and who also declined to give his name. "We want people in the United States to know that the statistics of this current election in Iran are entirely manipulated, something that is very hard to understand for people who have the luxury of living in a democratic environment," the doctor said.

Passing out fliers at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Dunster Street, a 23-year-old student from Tehran who lives in Cambridge said he was at the protest "to spread the news so that the international community exerts some force on Iranian diplomats to recount the votes." The man, who said he was one of the administrators for the protest's Facebook event page, said another motivation for his participation in the protest was that Western media were not accurately reporting on the election.

Visiting Harvard University's campus with his wife and two daughters, Jack Miraval, 53, of Fairfield, Conn., stopped outside the Harvard Square subway station to watch the protest.

"It's a shame that it was a landslide victory. People thought it was going to be a lot closer . . . The world needs to know that's not a true democracy," Miraval said.

No arrests were made in connection with the protest, according to Cambridge police.