Iran International
Some work on a petrochemical project in northern Iran has continued despite orders from the President and Supreme Court to halt construction, opponents claim.
Campaigners against the 800-trillion-rial ($3 billion) scheme posted videos on social media Tuesday evening claiming to show welding for fencing and other preparations for building the Miankaleh petrochemical plant continuing during hours of darkness after the Supreme Court ordered Tuesday a halt in construction pending an environmental assessment.
The Supreme Court's order to halt the project followed a social-media campaign and a petition to the oil minister and chief of the Department of Environment. Activists say the plant will have adverse environmental impacts on the coastal region. Celebrities, including actress Hedieh Tehrani, have backed the campaign, posting photos and banners on their social media pages.
The site is only a few kilometers from Miankaleh Peninsula in the east of the coastal region of Mazandaran, about 45km from Behshahr. The nearly 70,000-hectare peninsula, which separates the Gorgan Bay from the Caspian Sea, is home to a variety of birds and reptiles, and was designated as an international Unesco biosphere reserve in 1976.
When he inaugurated the project March 11, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi said it met environmental requirements, but the following day Ali Salajegjeh, head of the Environment Department, said the department had not authorized the plant’s construction.
75,000 jobs
Salajegheh has said some lawmakers support the plant on the grounds it can create 75,000 jobs. But the lawmakers have not substantiated such a high number. Usually a few hundred people work in a petrochemical plant. He has also argued that wildlife in the Miankaleh lagoon would be threatened by the project’s requirement for water and that the plant would cause pollution.
The project is owned by Amirabad-e Mazandaran Limited, which according to the official gazette was established less than a year ago by companies outside petrochemicals. Within an usually fast few months, the oil ministry agreed to provide natural gas for the project, which reportedly will produce 400,000 tons of propylene a year.
The official news agency, IRNA, reported Sunday that President Ebrahim Raisi had ordered the project scrapped. Government Spokesman Ali Bahadori-Jahromi said April 5 that the project would not go ahead before being endorsed by the Department of Environment.
Salajegheh has pledged not to surrender to any pressures to endorse the project and the official news agency, IRNA, reported Sunday that President Ebrahim Raisi had ordered the project to be scrapped. Government Spokesman Ali Bahadori-Jahromi also said on April 5 that the project would not be implemented before being endorsed by the Department of Environment.
Critics suspect the company that owns the project of having support from centers of power who are so influential that they can even bypass the President's orders.
"The halt in the construction of Miankaleh petrochemical plant is good news, but experience proves that the halt will be temporary, and contractors will return with even more destructive methods,” Javad Heydarian, a journalist focused on environmental issues tweeted Tuesday. “Those who implement such projects have so much money, power, and influence that they don't [have to] abide by any laws."
However, the IRGC is not simply a military organization. It also controls at least one fifth of Iran's economy. Opposition to delisting IRGC is growing in the US Congress, and one Iranian analyst says it could take months before the two sides resolve the issue.
Media reports indicate the United States has suggested it can delist the IRGC but keep its extraterritorial Qods (Quds) Force on the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list. From a chronological perspective, the Qods Force was designated in 2007 and it was the Trump Administration that designated the entire IRGC as a terrorist organization in 2019.
Earlier this week, some 250 Iranian lawmakers called on President Ebrahim Raisi to take a tougher position vis-à-vis the United States while some of them insisted that Iran should do away with the nuclear deal as it has not befitted from it.
Iranian academic and international relations expert Amir Ali Abolfath told Rouydad24 news website in Tehran on Tuesday that the Islamic Republic insists "all of the sanctions imposed on Iran after the 2018 US pull-out from the JCPOA should be lifted no matter they are about nuclear, missile or terrorist activities and the IRGC should be delisted."
He explained that if the United States keeps the Qods Force in the FTO list but delists the IRGC, this means that Washington likes to bring back the clock to pre-2019 period, but currently, Washington's plans are not quite clear.
Meanwhile, Abolfath said, "The IRGC is active in many areas including the economy. It owns many companies that could be sanctioned if the IRGC remained listed. There are many non-military companies whose board members were former IRGC officers or were linked to it. This means that If the IRGC remains in the FTO list, Iran's economic benefits from the JCPOA will be affected."
He added: "Iran does not insist on the delisting of the Qods Force as it has no economic activity and its commanders usually do not travel abroad [beyond regional counties]. But IRGC owns companies, such as in the telecommunication and shipping sectors…that will be affected by sanctions."
Abolfath also pointed out that any agreement at this point will not last longer than two or three years. If Republicans return to power, they will do away with the deal. This a challenge for Iranian officials who have already been in this position after former president Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018.
Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said recently that Iran has exchanged messages with the Washington, making it clear that it is important for Iran that the IRGC's dignity and role remain intact as one of the country's most key security and defense organizations.
He continued: "We can never allow ourselves to tell the US side that we can ignore the problem of IRGC [remaining listed]. Like many other discussions between us and the Americans, the IRGC is also a topic of the negotiations."
Abolfath, however, acknowledged that "the subject of the IRGC is one of the main problems in the negotiations and we have reached a disappointing deadlock over the subject. But the situation might change in the coming weeks. At the end, there has to be an agreement, but it could take another 6 months or a year before we get there."
In the meantime, new US sanctions against companies linked to the IRGC such as Parchin Chemical Industries, Pars Bana-ye Sadr and Sina Composite Delijan in early April has made the situation even more complicated.
"Martyr Soleimani was such a great character that if all American leaders are killed, this will still not avenge his assassination," commander of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) ground forces Mohammad Pakpour was quoted as saying by Iranian state media.
"We should avenge him by following Soleimani's path and through other methods," he added.
Pakpour referred to missile and other attacks against American targets and Israel as alternatives to killing US leaders.
Soleimani was killed in a targeted air strike by the orders of former president Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 in Baghdad. He was Iran's top military and intelligence operator in the Middle East, organizing militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere to attack American targets and US allies in the region.
Since his death, Iranian officials have threatened revenge against former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The statement comes as nuclear negotiations that started more than a year ago in Vienna are in limbo since March, because of Tehran’s demand for the United States to remove the IRGC from its Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list.
The Biden Administration so far has not accepted the demand, as bipartisan opposition in US Congress has grown to such a move. Pakpour’s statement might be intended to signal a retreat from the intention of killing American leaders, but it would hardly mollify those who aregue the IRGC is a terrorist organization.
However, reports have suggested Washington has been considering removing the IRGC from its foreign terrorist organization blacklist in return for Iranian assurances about reining in the elite force's influence in the Middle East.
Reports earlier also said that Washington might have offered Iran a solution to renounce any revenge against American leaders in exchange for removing IRGC as an FTO.
Then-US President Donald Trump’s administration said Soleimani was targeted for plotting attacks on US interests and that he had helped coordinate strikes on American forces in Iraq in the past through Iraqi Shiite militia proxies.
Pakpour's comments came days after US Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he does not support removing Iran's Qods (Quds) Force, an arm of its Revolutionary Guards, from a list of foreign terrorist organizations, as demanded by Tehran.
Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear agreement, known as JCPOA, under which Iran had agreed to curbs on its nuclear program in return for the lifting of international sanctions. Trump said the agreement was weak and could not prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons in the future. He also demanded Tehran stop its meddling in the region and arming militant proxy groups.
Proponents of removing the iRGC from the US terrorist list argue that the move will have little practical impact as other sanctions will remain in place. Opponents of the move say that the FTO list is not just symbolic, and many US anti-terror laws are based on a formal terror designation.
Iran's top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Tuesday that his country's future should not be tied to the success or collapse of nuclear talks with world powers.