Re: Iranians begin voting in Presidential Elections
Profiles of the Candidates:
Mahmoud Ahmadijed (Presently President of Islamic Republic of Iran)
Iran’s incumbent President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has formally announced his bid in the country’s June vote.
**Ahmadinejad will be the standard-bearer of the Principlist camp, which will be facing off against the Reformists in the country’s June 12 presidential election.
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He was born in 1956 into a working class family near the town of Garmsar-approximately 90 kilometers east of the capital Tehran.
One year after his birth, Ahmadinejad’s family moved to Iran’s mega capital Tehran. In the capital the future President of Iran studied hard at school and at the same time worked to as he puts it “to cover a portion of my family’s expenses and also my educational costs.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad took the nationwide entrance exam three years before the revolution, where he ranked 132nd out of 400,000 participants that year. He soon enrolled in the Iran’s prestigious University of Science and Technology (IUST) as an undergraduate student of civil engineering.
He was accepted to a Master of Science program at the same school in 1986, and eventually received his doctorate in 1997 in civil engineering and traffic transportation planning.
According to the President’s biography as a child he used to read newspapers with the help of other family members. That experience left a profound mark on his feelings toward his country and its ruler of the time, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
“My father used to buy newspaper all the time. I remember one day, when I was in first grade, by looking through a newspaper I read the news of the capitulation passage by the Shah’s so called “parliament.” Even though I did not understand the meaning of that issue at that time, but due to the protests and the objections of the religious schools of thoughts … and the relentless reaction of the Shah, I realized that Mohammad Reza attempted to add another page to his vicious case history which was the humiliation and indignity of the Iranian people versus Americans,” the president recalls on his weblog.
Like most Iranians Mr. Ahmadinejad welcomed the revolution in Iran which rocked the country and the world in 1979. After the revolution he voluntarily joined the Revolutionary Guards and served in covert operations against the forces of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during his eight year war against the young Islamic Republic during the 1980s.
He has served as governor to both Iran’s northwestern cites of Maku and Khoy in West Azarbaijan Province in the 1980s, advised governor general of Kurdistan Province for two years and eventually served as governor general of Ardabil Province in 1993.
Ahmadinejad was appointed mayor of Iran’s capital in 2003, and was included in a list of 65 finalists for World Mayor in 2005. He was among 3 strong candidates for the top-10 list but became non-eligible because of his resignation after his election to the presidency.
Ahmadinejad, who is currently experiencing his first term as president, **is better known for his domestic policies of petrol rationing and his handling of the windfall oil revenues in late 2008. His criticism of Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue and what he calls the misuse of the Holocaust to justify the creation of Israel on Palestinian territories has won him enemies within the West and friends within the Middle East public. **
Iran’s Election 2009
Mir-Hussein Mousavi (Presidential Hopeful and contender)
Mir-Hossein Mousavi was born during turbulent times in Iran’s history.
The 67-year-old architect and painter turned politician, was born two weeks after the allied powers, Britain and the Soviet Union, invaded Iran in 1941, forcing Iran’s monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi to hand over his throne to his 22 year old son Mohammad Reza.
On Monday, Sep. 29, 1941, Mousavi birthday, the Time Magazine revealed how “Reza, a choleric old man” had relied on Britain’s “whip-smart” Minister Sir Reader William Bullard for his every move.
The article titled Two Mohammeds said although the British had not officially played kingmakers, they had done “yeoman work behind the scenes.”
Iranians still recall how during World War II the allies ignored the country’s neutrality, only to simultaneously enter Iran on August 26, 1941. Iran’s neutrality didn’t matter as the two powers sought to secure Iranian oil fields and ensure supply lines for the Soviets fighting against Germany on the Eastern Front.
Mousavi, the son of a tradesman, was raised in the northwestern city of Khameneh. He proved to be a diligent student, obtaining his Masters degree in Architecture from Tehran’s prestigious Melli (Shahid Beheshti) University in 1969.
During the same year, the young Mousavi designed main building of the Provincial Water and Sewerage Company of Isfahan. He made his first mark on Iran’s politics in 1971, when he started the design of the building known as “Kanoun Tohid” which served as one of the major venues for anti-Shah forces before the revolution.
Five years later, the then 33 year old, began his career as an academic, teaching architecture students at the same university.
The current president of the Iranian Academy of Arts, has served as Iran’s Foreign Minister and Prime Minster in the 1980s, during the eight year long Iran-Iraq war. In the early years of the revolution, Mousavi was the editor-in-chief of the official newspaper of the Islamic Republic Party, the Jomhouri-e Eslami (Islamic Republic) newspaper.
After constitutional amendments removed the post of prime minister in 1989, Mousavi dedicated much of his time in the past two decades to the arts.
The 67-year-old is married to the first female chancellor of a university after the 1979 revolution, politician, writer and academic Zahra Rahnavard and has three daughters.
Iran’s Election 2009
**Mohsin Rezai **(Presidential Hopeful and contender)
Mohsen Rezai was born on the first day of September, 1954.
He was born to the Bakhtiari tribe during the migrating between summer quarters and winter quarters, somewhere around the southwestern city of Masjed Soleiman.
After settling in the city, little Sabzevar as he was known, managed to enter the state oil academy. In 1973 he was admitted to The University of Science and Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering.
Upon entering the prestigious university, Rezai entered a veteran revolutionary group known as Mansouroun, where he changed his name to Mohsen to avoid being captured by the Shah’s notorious intelligence agency, Savak.
Formed in Ahvaz, Khorramshahr and Dezful – all major cities in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan Province-the group aimed at raising awareness within the province against poverty and the major divide between the rich and the poor in the country.
Their opposition to foreign control over the country’s oil assets, namely the United Sates, displeased the Shah leading to a number of arrests. Leading Mansouroun members, including Rezai, were caught and held for months but the cultural and social nature of the movement prevented the authorities from pressing any charges.
After the revolution in 1979, Rezaei was appointed as the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, leading the force during the eight-year war with Iraq.
In 1997, the veteran war commander resigned from his post and became the secretary of Iran’s top arbitration body known as the Expediency Council.
Rezaei who after the revolution obtained a PhD in economics, has adopted ‘economic rescue’ as his campaign slogan.
Rezaei who deems “constructive criticism” necessary has questioned the current government’s financial management, arguing that his criticism of Ahmadinejad’s policies have always been ‘fair and constructive.’
Rezai is married to fellow Mansouroun member, Masoumeh Khadangh and has two sons and three daughters.
Iran’s Election 2009
Mahdi Karroubi (Presidential hopeful and contender)
Mahdi Karroubi:
Reformist hopeful, Mahdi Karroubi, who was the first figure to announce his candidacy in October is the son of the revolutionary and outspoken cleric, Ahmad Karroubi.
Born in 1937 in the western city of Aligoodarz, Mahdi at an early age witnessed his father’s arrest by the Shah’s notorious intelligence service, SAVAK, and his exile to different parts of the country.
The Shah’s brutal rule left his mark on Karroubi, prompting the cleric to pursue the path of his father in being a cleric. He also attained a bachelors degree in Islamic jurisprudence from the capital’s prestigious University of Tehran.
Before the revolution in 1979, Karroubi suffered prison and torture in the hands of the Shah’s notorious secret police.
After the revolution, the middle-ranking cleric, established the Martyrs Foundation which was provide support to the families of martyrs and war veterans.
He has also has served as parliament speaker (1990-1992 and 2000- 2004) and has also founded the moderate Etemad Melli (National Trust) party in 2005, after splitting from the more conservative Association of Combatant Clerics of Tehran.
Karoubi almost made it to the second round of the 2005 presidential elections, closely following the frontrunners, ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Karroubi is the editor-in-chief of the daily paper, Etemad Melli, which is considered one of Iran’s best newspapers by virtue of its candor and criticism of the government - particularly in its coverage of the economy.
Like ex-president Mohammad Khatami, he is a proponent of a civil society and runs his campaign with the slogan of ‘Change’.
He has recently indicated that he hopes to “bring about change in Iran’s Executive Body” and has vowed to fully implement the Constitution if elected president.
“I’ll do my best to employ all the articles of the Constitution but if I cannot do that, I will clearly inform the nation about it,” Karroubi has pledged.
He is married to Fatemeh Karroubi, the secretary general of International Muslim Women Union and has four children.
Iran’s Election 2009