Barrage Of Criticism Hits Iran’s President Amid Worsening Conditions
Print media in Iran was full of criticism on Saturday highlighting the Raisi government's inefficiency and ineptitude in improving the dire economic situation.
Print media in Iran was full of criticism on Saturday highlighting the Raisi government's inefficiency and ineptitude in improving the dire economic situation.
After eight months in office, President Ebrahim Raisi has failed to make a dent in inflation, hovering around 40 percent, and rising food prices. Media in Iran are full of news about meat and vegetable prices breaching new levels, as the government starts to give food stamps to the hungry for bread.
Nuclear scientist and former lawmaker from Esfahan, Ahmad Shirzad told Etemad Online website: "One of Raisi's biggest problems is that he appointed almost everyone in his clan to key posts in the government regardless of their expertise. Anyone who bows to him will become a manager. This leaves no hope for the government's future."
Shirzad added that even a reshuffling of the cabinet is not likely to lead to improvement because Raisi will most likely choose people who are even weaker than current officials.
Shirzad pointed out that although Raisi pretends to be powerful, he is not the one who makes all the decisions. He and his ministers simply carry out decisions that are made by others. Shirzad did not name who "others" were, but in the Iranian context that could only mean Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
It is clear to most commentators in Iran that there should be a nuclear deal with the United States to lift sanctions and this decision lies with Khamenei. But this is not something they can say publicly, as it would be seen as criticizing the Supreme Leader. Instead, attacks intensify against Raisi for the deteriorating economic situation.
During the weak, other critics wondered where is all the extra money from additional oil exports Raisi claims his government was able to pull off despite United States’ sanctions.
Meanwhile, reformist lawmaker Massoud Pezeshkian said in an interview with Didban Iran website that "Iran belongs to all Iranians not to the members of a certain group." Criticizing Raisi's inaction, he said, the president made a lot of promises during his campaign without realizing that he has to fulfill some of them, or be criticized.
"You cannot swear at the United States from outside the government, but when you run the government and need to take care of the people's livelihood amid economic problems, then you will see that you need a practical and realistic approach to political matters," Pezeshkian said.
Asked whether the impeachment of Raisi's economic ministers and reshuffling of his cabinet would be a solution to the country's problems, Pezeshkian said: "I do not believe that would solve any problem as long as Raisi and his government do not change their approach to management." He added, "When you have no idea of the road ahead and no plan to go further, even the best driver in town cannot help you reach your destination, if you have one."
In another development, reformist political commentator Abbas Abdi said in a commentary in Etemad website that "all of Raisi's propaganda and accusations against the previous government have come back to hit him like a boomerang."
He wrote, "all politicians magnify their own performance and belittle their predecessors' achievements, but if you do this in an exaggerated way, as Raisi did, then you will get a result contrary to what you had in mind."
With all the criticisms Raisi voiced about the administration of Hassan Rouhani, people expected that he would solve some issues within a few months, but problems are still there after eight months and there has been no improvement to make the nation hopeful, Abdi said.
He added that "The elite wanted to see that Raisi forms an efficient cabinet, and for the people, it was important to see that the cabinet would deal with inflation, unemployment, shortcomings in public services and so on. Had it happened, it would have been a positive change."
Lotfollah Siahkali, a lawmaker from Ghazvin and a member of the Iranian parliament's Industry Committee, said in an interview with Rouydad24 news website that the motion to impeach Iran's Industry Minister was handed over to the presidium in early March, but the body has still not put it on parliament’s agenda.
The Majles (parliament) began to warn Raisi about the weak performance of his economic team including the ministers of industry (Reza Fatemi Amin), labor (Hojjat Abdolmaleki) and economy (Ehsan Khandouzi), two months after Raisi took office in August 2021. Since then, Raisi has said repeatedly that he is planning a reshuffling but has not done anything yet. He had promised both during his election campaign and in the following months that he was adamant to improve the critical economic situation of ordinary people.
In the meantime, lawmakers have renewed their calls for impeachments almost every month. Siahkali said the ministers have been constantly lobbying with the Majles presidium to delay their impeachment. At least in one case, Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf told the lawmakers to wait until the Iranian New Year in late March before beginning to table the impeachment motion for the labor minister.
While the government claims it is exporting more oil and gas, inflation remains high, with people falling deeper into poverty. Lawmakers want to know why the situation is not improving.
Some have concluded that either the government is not telling the truth about boosting oil and gas exports, or it is spending the revenues on something other than improving the people's livelihood.
Siahkali is focused on the plan to impeach the industry minister by pointing out his failures and make sure that none of the economic ministers can avoid being impeached.
At the same time, complaints about the performance of other economic ministers have been on the rise. Iranian economist and Al-Zahra University academic Hossein Raghfar said this week that rising inflation and the consequences of handing over oil sales to powerful institutions outside the oil ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company, mainly to military entites such as the IRGC, are two of the problems created by the Raisi administration for Iran's ailing economy.
While some of the economists in Iran have predicted a triple-digit inflation rate in the coming, Raghfar said in his interview with the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA) that inflation will certainly rise further, while the government keeps publishing unrealistic figures, which people cannot believe.
He insisted handing over oil sales to the military sharply raises the cost of economic transactions and will lead to widespread corruption. All this will adversely affect the economy by creating instability that deterring investments. He added: "In this situation, we can say with a good degree of certainty that the recession and inflation, which overwhelmed the economy in the 2010s will continue."
Meanwhile Raghfar argued that even if a nuclear deal is signed and sanctions lifted, it will not be easy for Iran to solve its economic crisis. "I believe even without foreign economic problems; Iran's economy will find it hard to recover. There might be some additional revenue, but this will not affect the situation of investment and employment." He added that the Iranian government does not seem to have any solution to tackle these problems in the future.
Speaking to Iran International TV on Friday, Narges Mohammadi said Western sanctions have failed to weaken Iran's oppressive regime but led to a "disastrous weakening of the Iranian middle class as the driving force of democracy".
The sanctions failed, she argued, because they were not "targeted" and Western politicians did not have adequate knowledge of the Islamic Republic system.
"It appears that the West lacks a proper understanding of the hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic and that it is a dictatorial government with systemic financial corruption that can use various tools [of repression]," she told Iran International.
There has been huge social media controversy over Mohammadi's views over sanctions after a Washington Post opinion article Wednesday referring to interviews with her in which she said sanctions weaken Iran’s civil society.
Critics attacked Mohammadi accusing her of defending the lifting of US sanctions, and her approach benefits the regime and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) which is also under US sanctions.
The controversy gained more attention among Iranians because the Washington Post article coincided with Iran’s demand from the Biden administration to remove the IRGC from its foreign terrorist list as a condition for the revival of the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Mohammadi told Iran International that in the interview with the Washington Post she had said that she considers the IRGC as an oppressive force and a violator of human rights and that it must be targeted by the international community by various means including sanctions but not all her comments had been included in the article.
Mohammadi also explained that she believes the international community has the duty to target "any person or group" in the Islamic Republic that violates human rights to support the Iranian people and civil society and one of the ways to target the violators is using sanctions.
Mohammadi added that the IRGC's "political, terroristic, and economic investments and activities", both inside and outside the country, result in oppression of the Iranian civil society and therefore it must be placed on the list of "targeted" international sanctions along with other entities of the Islamic Republic that violate human rights such as its Judiciary and Police.
Some harshly attacked her integrity and questioned her honesty as a regime critic, while others said she should have been more careful during the interview with the author of the Washington Post opinion article, Jason Rezaian.
Mohammadi has an eight-year sentence hanging over her head for supposed “crimes against national security”, for her activities as a human rights activist and may be hauled off to prison any moment to serve it.
Cofounder and chair of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, Mohammadi has been to jail several times over the past two decades. She was freed from Evin prison in September 2020 after serving five and half years when she had no contact with her husband and children for long periods of time.
But one of Mohammadi's supporters in a tweet Thursday said she could not understand why she was criticized so strongly. "She has said that sanctions destroy the civil society. Do you doubt this statement? wrote Banafsheh Jamali, a feminist activist. "People are not going to have any demands other than economic ones when they are in dire need of food to survive," she added.
Some argue that it is difficult to put in place effective sanctions that do not lead to economic pressure on the people, and mention the example of Russia. If the government is supposed to be pressured to stop a certain behavior, it must feel economic pressure, which invariably also impacts the people.
Others say that the civil society Mohammadi refers to has not been able to reform the Islamic Republic and has been badly suppressed, so sanctions are the remaining tool to bring about a change.
An Afghan immigrant attacked three clerics at the most important Shiite shrine in Iran April 5 in what President Ebrahim Raisi has called a “Takfiri” assault, referring to Sunni extremists.
Calling the incident " a terrorist attack", the Jomhuri Eslami said in its editorial on Thursday, this is only one of the negative consequences of the Iranian government's "easy approach" to the takeover of Taliban in Afghanistan.
The daily also claimed that "Taliban elements have brought all sorts of weapons to Iran and have prepared places to recruit Takfiri elements," and called all this part of a special plot to carry out the conspiracies hatched by the enemies of the Islamic Republic.
Demographic danger
According to Jomhuri Eslami, "some 8 million Afghans are living in Iran and every day at least another 10,000 Afghans arrive legally or illegally. The daily also revealed that Iranian officials issue up to 7,000 visas to Afghans every day while the borders are left open for immigrants to enter illegally.
If this estimate of the Afghan population in Iran is correct, it means around 10 percent of the country’s 83-million population is comprised of Afghan nationals. Some even argue that Iran’s actual population is much less than what the government claims, since millions have left the country for good.
The daily added that most Afghan immigrants are Pashtuns, and that up to 75 percent of births in hospitals in Tehran and its suburbs are registered by Afghans. The birth rate among Afghan women in Iran is between 4.7 to 5.2, the daily reported, adding that there are 600,000 Afghan students at government schools, while officials predict that this number will rise to 1.2 million next year.
As a result, the daily warned, that the demographic combination of provinces such as Esfahan, Yazd, Kerman and Sistan-Baluchestan is changing and some 35 percent of the population in some areas are Afghans. This is evident around the Revolution Square, Azadi Square and the Persian Gulf Lake near Tehran.
Jomhouri Eslami further claimed that with the 2019 legislation granting Iranian citizenship to the children of Iranian women marrying foreigners, a tsunami of “buying Iranian girls and women” from poor families has started in Iran.
The daily warned that the combination of these changes will lead to an uncontrollablesocial catastrophe including insecurity in the near future.
Taliban Infilteration
The editorial noted that although the Taliban had committed many crimes in the first round of their takeover in 2001, including murdering two dozen Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i Sharif, Iranian officials welcomed the second Taliban takeover eight months ago, claiming that the Taliban have changed. The daily also warned that the Taliban is not an entity separate from the ISIS. "You cannot separate the Taliban from the ISIS, in the same way that you cannot separate the United States from Satan," the editorial said.
Earlier, even before the attack at the shrine in Mashhad, Iranian observers, including Jomhouri Eslami's editor Masih Mohajeri had warned that uncontrolled immigration of Afghans into Iran might lead to an infiltration by the Taliban and ISIS militants that will threaten Iran's security. The daily, as well as commentators in other media outlets in Iran had also warned that the influx of Pashtuns into Iran might lead to disputes and even conflicts between Iranian Shiites and Afghan Sunnis.
Iranians traditionally support the Hazarah and Tajik communitiess of Afghanistan who speak the same language as Iranians, but do not trust Pashtuns who live further down in southern Afghanistan.
The daily stressed that "The Taliban has not changed during the past 20 years and is still the same terrorist group." Jomhouri Eslami further called for replacing all the pro-Taliban Iranian officials at the Iranian embassy in Kabul and the Iranian Foreign Ministry. It also called on Iran's state television to replace its policy of “beautifying the Taliban” with real news dissemination. "Iran should be purged from Afghan infiltrators, the borders with Afghanistan should come under strict control and Iran should recognize only an Afghan government that comes to power through a free and fair election," the editorial concluded.