Iran - Andrew Burke [31]
Afghan refugees started arriving in Iran in 1980 and soon spread out from camps on the eastern border into larger towns. Most have settled onto Iranian society’s lowest rungs, living in the oldest and cheapest parts of Iranian cities and working menial jobs that Iranians don’t want to do; almost every construction worker in the country is Afghan. Unlike Iraqis, Afghans don’t have full access to health and education in Iran. In short, while the Iranian economy relies on the cheap labour provided by Afghans, they are widely distrusted and treated as second-class citizens.
Since the fall of the Taleban Iran has encouraged Afghans to go home. At the same time it has started fining and imprisoning employers who provide jobs to foreigners – usually Afghans – without work permits. By choice or otherwise, many Afghans have gone back to their homeland, but a good percentage of them cannot find jobs or secure lodgings and are soon back in Iran.
Most of the 1.5 million Iraqi Kurds who took refuge in Iran during the 1990s have since been repatriated. However, many of the more than 200,000 ethnic Iranians expelled from Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War have now settled permanently in Iran. Many were descended from Iranians who had settled in Iraq centuries before. Along with Iraqi Shiites who fled Saddam’s Iraq, Iran resettled them all, despite the war-torn economy.
Since the revolution of 1979, there has been a steady emigration of educated Iranians abroad. Estimates of the number vary from 750,000 to 1.5 million. Most have settled in Western Europe, North America and, to a lesser extent, Australia and Turkey. Some of these early Iranian emigrants were members of the prerevolutionary political elite who succeeded in transferring much of their wealth out of Iran.
Other émigrés included members of religious minorities, especially Baha’is and Jews; intellectuals who had opposed the old regime, which they accused of suppressing free thought and who found the Islamic Republic no better; political opponents of the government in Tehran; and young men who deserted from the military or sought to avoid conscription.
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MEDIA
The struggle for influence and power is increasingly played out in Iran’s media. The relative freedom of the press, an achievement of President Khatami’s government, saw a blossoming of ideas and opinions that challenged the official line. During the late 1990s dozens of proreform newspapers were opened. Many, however, were soon shut down and reformist writers and editors were jailed.
Officially, the constitution provides for freedom of the press as long as published material accords with Islamic principles. The publisher is required by law to have a valid publishing licence and those perceived as being anti-Islamic are not granted a licence. In practice, the criteria for being anti-Islamic have been broadly interpreted to encompass all materials that include anti-regime sentiment.
During his high-profile visit to New York in September 2007, President Ahmadinejad described Iranian people as ‘the freest in the world’. As Paris-based NGO Reporters Sans Frontiers responded in an open letter to Mr Ahmadinejad, in the year prior to this statement 73 journalists had been arrested and 10 remained in prison when he made the claim. Two of these, magazine journalists working in Kordestan, had been sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal for conducting ‘subversive activities against national security’ and peddling ‘separatist propaganda’.
Broadcast Media
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IRAN’S BIG BRAIN DRAIN
Iran suffers from what has been described as the worst ‘brain drain’ in the world. The country’s lack of internationally recognised educational facilities, high unemployment and restrictions on personal freedom mean many of its educated young people feel forced to leave. Economists reckon Iran needs to create more than a million jobs a year just