Sorayya* submitted her absentee ballot to vote in the Iranian presidential election at 3 p.m. June 12.

Two hours after the UW senior cast her ballot, her family received a call from Iran.

“My grandparents called and said [the Iranian government] announced the president,” Sorayya said. “We voted just two hours before we were told about the announcement, so we were very surprised about the results.”

News coverage of the current political turmoil in Iran resonates deep emotional feelings for several UW students of Iranian descent, many of whom have relatives living in the country.

The protests in Iran gained momentum after the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency declared incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the victor of the presidential election with 63 percent of the votes. Supporters of the Reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi flooded the streets of Tehran, primarily in Azadi and Enghelab squares, wearing green, the color of Mousavi’s campaign.

Many of the protesters in Iran also covered their faces with scarves and masks, fearing reprisal by a paramilitary volunteer force called the Basij if they are identified in media coverage. UW students who occasionally travel to visit relatives in the country, such as Sorayya, also felt the fear of government reprisal.

“It’s not that people of Iran are so behind Mousavi; it’s the idea of freedom that Mousavi represented,” said junior Cyrus Kazemi, who has relatives in Iran. “They feel like the government was taking away the freedom they got so close to achieving.”

A popular message on protest signs asked in English: “Where is my vote?” Although most of the signs carried by protesters were written in Farsi, many signs targeted Western audiences with English writing.

“Iranians want their voices to be heard,” Sorayya said. “It’s not that they want Mousavi or Ahmadinejad, it’s the principle of their voices not being heard. A lot of people felt it was more like a selection than an election.”

The president of Iran is the nation’s highest elected official but is subordinate to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The president does not make major foreign policy decisions or control Iran’s armed forces and must be approved by a group of six religious clerics and six legal experts known as the Guardian Council. The chairman of the Guardian Council is a strong supporter of Khamenei.

“What happened in Iran was the breaking point,” Sorayya said. “Iranians really appreciate and look up to the freedoms Americans have, and they want to have the same thing there.”

Sorayya said young people in Iran look to Western countries for more than just political inspiration.

“When you walk down the more affluent streets of Tehran, you see the young generation imitating the style of large fashion hubs like Los Angeles,” she said.

More than 60 percent of Iran’s population is under the age of 30 as a result of a booming birthrate that followed the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

That revolution resulted in the overthrow of Iran’s monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and its replacement with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

“The shah of Iran was a megalomaniac who pushed the country to a point where the military abandoned him, the people rose up and the Islamic republic is what emerged,” said Talal Hattar, a political science graduate student and TA.

Many Iranian-Americans are critical of the Iranian government because of the conditions that forced large numbers of Iranians to flee during the revolution, but Iranian-Americans are not homogeneous in their perceptions of the events currently unfolding.

“There is a large part of the population embracing the reformists, but they’re not trying to be a new United States,” said junior Alec Maghami. “They want something closer to what China has where the government still has the reigns of the country, but it will embrace capitalism.”

Maghami’s grandfather was a doctor and a professor at the University of Tehran before the revolution. His grandfather and father fled Iran at the onset of the revolution and settled in the United States.

Although the crisis in Iran has been compared to the 1979 revolution, the government has not demonstrated any intention of changing its structure.

The theocratic republic sees authority divided between elected officials and senior clerics but is ultimately overseen by the supreme leader.

The supreme leader and the Guardian Council have demonstrated their control over the country through ordering its military and law enforcement forces to quell the protests and rejecting any possibility of a re-election.

The size of the current protests — the biggest since 1979 — is significant because it serves as an indicator to Western observers that the supreme leader’s control over Iran may no longer be as strong as previously thought.

The government’s theocratic nature has led to laws that prohibit alcohol and tobacco and censor cultural influence.

“In Iran, there are certain books you’re not allowed to read, so some people set up networks where they trade books for underground book reading,” Kazemi said. “There is heavy censorship on the Internet, so Twitter became big during the elections because it was one of the few mediums that wasn’t as censored.”

The BBC reported in late May that Iranians attempting to log onto Facebook received a message in Farsi that read, “Access to this site is not possible.”

The Iranian government shut down text messaging service and Facebook in the days preceding the elections to prevent Mousavi from gaining more supporters in the weeks leading up to the election.

Many of the UW students who still have family members in Iran have experienced a roller coaster of emotions in recent weeks: relief in learning their family members are safe, disappointment as their votes appear to have gone uncounted, and optimism that this month’s events will be a catalyst for change in the future.

“I would like to see continued pressure on the Islamic republic and pressure on the leadership to change the way the government is structured,” Maghami said. “I would like to see the power divide at the top in the clerical ranks lead to a slackening of the reigns on military pressure on the people, and that leading to increased reformist rights.”

Although separated by 12 times zones and 6,700 miles, many UW Iranian-Americans are perhaps just as connected to the streets of Iran as the protesters themselves. Glued to the TV, refreshing their Internet browsers and waiting for the phone to ring, they anxiously anticipate news that has been 30 years in the making.

*Last name withheld for security reasons.

Reach reporter Michael Truong at features@dailyuw.com.