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Families Of Government Victims In Iran Campaign For Election Boycott

Families whose loved ones were victims of government violence in Iran are campaigning on social media for the boycott of Iran's June presidential election, saying their votes would allow a system they consider suppressive to claim legitimacy. Others are also calling for a boycott and demand a referendum to change the governing system.

Social media users using the hashtags #NoToIslamic Republic and #NoToVoting since early March are campaigning against the Islamic Republic. Iran's exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi -who has 1.8 million followers on Instagram, 100,000 on Telegram, and over 460,000 on Twitter - has endorsed their campaign.

With the two campaigns hand-in-hand, the two hashtags ranked second and third respectively among top Persian-language hashtags on Twitter on Sunday.

“The message of the people in the upcoming elections to the west must be regime change,” one Twitter user said in the early days of the campaign using the hashtags #NoToIslamicRepublic and #IranRegimeChange in Persian. “People’s message to the western [countries] must be: 'We have not elected this regime and it lacks legitimacy,” he said.

On Monday, 231 political activists and relatives of government victims also issued a letter calling on people to unite in boycotting the election. They represent a cross-section of political, ethnic and religious groups calling for a non-violent “passage from the Islamic Republic” to a government “by the people and for the people.” They demanded the resignation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and a referendum to establish a democratic form of government.

US-based Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad on Sunday Tweeted a video with English subtitles with the hashtag #NoVotingForIR. It shows family members of government violence victims naming their lost loved ones and saying why they would not vote in any election held under Iran’s Islamic Republic.

Those remembered in the video were killed in protests and prisons in the past four decades, the video said. It also includes those who lost their lives in the shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner by an Iranian air-defense missile battery in January 2020 at a time of high tension with the United States following an Iranian missile strike against US bases in Iraq. More videos would follow, Alinejad said.

"They told me they had done a good thing when they killed my son," says the mother of 22-year-old Ebrahim Ketabdar, who was shot dead by security forces during November 2019 protests in Karaj. "I will not vote because of 42 years of injustice, inequality, unemployment, poverty, and murders," says the father of 26-year-old protester Mostafa Karimbeigi, beaten to death in prison in 2009 after the disputed presidential election.

"For 20 years the Iranian people and civil society did their best to make the Islamic Republic reform itself through elections and ballot boxes so that they would not have to pay the costs of regime change,” Mahdieh Golroo, the campaign spokesperson and exiled activist, wrote in a pinned tweet from December 2019. “[The path of] change through ballot boxes has reached its end.”

Campaigners are using other social media platforms such as Telegram, a popular application with nearly 50 million subscribers in Iran, to get their campaign for an electoral boycott across. A recent poll conducted by Statis for Iran International TV  indicates very little interest in the poll. Only 27 percent of the sample population interviewed by phone said they would vote. A further 18 percent were undecided, while 55 percent said they had no plans to vote.

A British-Iranian journalist, political analyst and former correspondent of The National and journalist at Iran International
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