The odds are always with whoever has control of the army and airwaves. People can be forgiven for already assuming that the hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating today in Tehran will fail in contesting the election results. Perhaps they will. But then again, perhaps they won’t. Mir-Hossein Mousavi has a lot of people on his side and we don’t just mean the throngs in the street. He was accompanied today in his appearance in Tehran in front of his supporters with former President Mohamed Khatami and the other rival presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi. Even the right wing candidate (to the right of Ahmadinejad), Mohsen Razaee (a former leader of the Revolutionary Guard), has contested the election results. And these aren’t necessarily soft touches…. Each was involved in the revolution that brought down the US supported monarchy and still remembers how that went.
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It was an incredible sight. A huge crowd, hundreds of thousands of people maybe even millions of people there in defiance of open threats from the government that they should not assemble. The security forces were staying well away – we were even able to film and usually the secret police come in straight away and stop you. But the crowds were so enormous they were stepping back.
And a wonderful moment caught on tape: a spontaneous demonstration.