Middle East & Africa | Iran and sanctions

When will it ever end?

For ordinary Iranians, daily life goes from bad to worse

THE last time fruit and chicken were luxuries in Iran was back in the 1980s, when the country was fighting against Iraq. On the whole, Iranians believed that their young Islamic Republic needed protecting from Saddam Hussein and his Western backers. Non-combatants in the big cities generally accepted shortages and other privations with patriotic stoicism.

Two-and-a-half decades on, Iran again gives the impression of a country at war even if, for the moment, the guns are silent. Prices of basic food, clothes and electronic goods have soared as a result of international sanctions and a plummeting currency; the rial has more than halved in value over the past year. Nobody believes the official figure of 24% for the annual rate of inflation. Civil servants have been reduced to moonlighting in menial jobs to make up for their shrinking buying power.

The solidarity of the 1980s is conspicuous by its absence. Last month a limited sale of subsidised chicken prompted mini-riots. To engage a taxi-driver in conversation in the capital, Tehran, is to invite a tearful jeremiad against life’s iniquities. Even the fasting month of Ramadan, the traditional time for restraint and pious introspection, seems often to be abused as people smoke or munch openly in violation of official propaganda. “How can I fast for 18 hours a day,” asks a bazaar trader, “when my nerves are shot to bits?”

The country’s leaders have belatedly acknowledged that their insistence that Iran must enrich its uranium in defiance of the West is causing pain. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called for an “economy of resistance” based on self-reliance. If meat is not available, says one Friday prayer leader, people should make do with traditional egg soup.

In fact, Iran is much richer than it was in the war years of the 1980s. On paper at least, it earned a plentiful $120 billion from oil revenues in the financial year ending in March 2011. Some of the lucre has gone to finance the pro-poor subsidies beloved of the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but big sums have also found their way into the pockets of senior clerics, former Revolutionary Guard commanders and well-connected businessmen at the heart of the economic elite. Porsche says it sold more cars in Tehran in 2011 than in any other city in the Middle East.

Politics and economics are notoriously mixed. Shortly before Ramadan, a sumptuous open-air wedding party for the son of a very rich businessman was invaded by masked riot police who had apparently been dispatched at the instigation of a political foe. To the screams of guests, the police fired tear-gas and pulverised crystal fixtures as the inhabitants of neighbouring apartment blocks looked on in horrified fascination.

The worst effects of oil sanctions are only now starting to be felt, as a European Union embargo against Iranian crude takes effect, buyers such as South Korea and Turkey move their custom from Iran to other suppliers (Saudi Arabia, in the main), and payments are delayed because of Iran’s exclusion from a system of electronic bank transfers. Oil receipts are thought to be down by one-third on the beginning of the year, while the industry struggles to acquire equipment and to build storage to hold the growing lake of oil for which buyers have not been found.

Paying the price

The supreme leader disapproves of Iran’s dependence on hydrocarbon revenues and has called for investment in the country’s non-oil economy. But speculation offers better returns. Industrial units on Tehran’s southern fringe lie idle as investors buy foreign currencies or fixed assets as a hedge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is hard to find Iranians who argue that their travails are a price worth paying for nuclear self-sufficiency as a barrier against foreign-inspired regime change.

This is what their leaders insist, but they do their cause little good by squabbling among themselves. Less than a year before he is due to step down, Mr Ahmadinejad seems to be losing a power struggle with rivals who enjoy the support of Mr Khamenei. On July 30th four men believed to be associates of the president’s most controversial ally, Esfandiyar Rahim Mashaei, were sentenced to death for their role in a bank fraud said to have been worth $2.6 billion. Rumours suggest Mr Mashaei may himself be a defendant.

The president has accused his political enemies of deliberately stoking inflation in order to harm him. Parliament plans to deny the government a role in staging next year’s elections, the plan apparently being to “elect” a candidate more fully obedient to the supreme leader, whom obsequious disciples now consider quasi-divine.

The Islamic Republic now seems to be more disliked than at any time since the revolution of 1979 that ended the monarchy, for which some people are showing nostalgia. Back in 2009, middle-class Iranians launched a pro-democracy agitation in response to Mr Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election, yet many poor and pious Iranians stayed on the sidelines when the protests were crushed. Since then, however, dissatisfaction has spread. In the words of a middle-aged father trying to get his son to Canada: “Why should he stay? To watch the country tip into chaos?”

Fear as well as loathing

Hanging over all such calculations is the fear that Israel or America may attack Iran’s nuclear sites and set off a wider regional conflict. Iran seems to base its foreign policy on the assumption that, whatever the results of on-off nuclear negotiations conducted with the UN Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany, the West is bent on toppling the regime. As evidence of this, Iran cites not only sanctions but also the assassination of five scientists associated with the nuclear programme and the infiltration of a computer worm, presumably by America and Israel, into its main enrichment plant.

The Iranians also fear that they could lose Syria as an ally to America if Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, is overthrown. On August 4th 48 Iranians were kidnapped near the Syrian capital Damascus by rebels claiming that their victims were on a military mission. Iran says the hostages are pilgrims and has asked Turkey and Qatar, which have good relations with the rebels, to intervene to get them freed.

Iran’s loyalty to Mr Assad is partly meant to counter the stance of its regional rival, Saudi Arabia, in favour of Syria’s rebels. Hardliners in Tehran have been cock-a-hoop over recent unrest in Shia-majority provinces in eastern Saudi Arabia. For their part, besides hoovering up customers for Iran’s oil, the Saudis are said to have executed several Iranian convicts who had been languishing for years in a Saudi jail.

Ordinary Iranians are suffering from policies of confrontation on which they have not been consulted. In 2006, when George Bush’s administration and its European allies drafted the first batch of punitive measures against Iran, the talk was of “smart” sanctions targeting only Iran’s nuclear activities. The reality, six years on, is of a people tested to the limits of their endurance while under the shadow of another perceived threat: that today’s almost-war will become tomorrow’s real one.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "When will it ever end?"

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