Iran - Andrew Burke [32]
Faced with such prospects, and a long-held government attitude that anyone who doesn’t like life in Iran ‘should just leave’, every year more than 150,000 educated young people leave Iran for countries such as the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada, where Iranians are the most educated group of immigrants. Among these are many of the country’s brightest minds. Foreign embassies in Tehran keep a keen eye out for graduates of the best universities, and we have even heard of bidding wars between countries for top students. Estimates put the economic loss to Iran at tens of billions of dollars a year.
At least four million Iranians now live abroad. Few of these will ever return, though on this research trip we did meet some who had come home after living more than 10 years in the US or Europe. But the more common message was summed up by one man we met in Tehran: ‘I came back to see whether I’d be able to live here again, but I can’t do it. Going from the freedom I have had in London for the last two years to the restrictions here would just be too hard.’
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In the broadcast media, satellite TV has provided many Iranians with a welcome window on the world. Although still officially banned, stand on the roof of any building in Tehran and you’ll see a forest of dishes pointing skyward. For many, access to foreign broadcasters is almost unlimited. One Tehrani told us ‘I just got rid of 200 stations, so now I only have about 800’. More than a dozen opposition TV stations beam Persian-language broadcasts into Iran, mostly from the USA. Arab and Turkish stations are also picked up as are some news channels, such as BBC and Euronews. Indeed, the BBC thinks the Iranian market is important enough that it will launch a Persian-speaking satellite channel in 2008. As with the liberal newspapers, there are periodic clampdowns when uniformed men armed with hacksaws confiscate satellite dishes.
Of course, not everyone can afford satellite TV. Those going without are limited to five or six pretty dire state-run channels; four national networks and one or two provincial channels run by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) service. On these you’ll see constant reminders of the Iran–Iraq War, martyrs, political propaganda, prayer, preaching mullahs, football (local and European), news, and lots of jarring reminders of the social conventions, such as women-only game shows and soap operas in which women wear hejab in bed. All up, more than 80% of the population watches TV from one source or another.
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Photojournalist Kaveh Golestan’s documentary on the plight of Iranian intellectuals, Recording the Truth, made for British television, led to his two-year house arrest. He joined the BBC in 1999 and was killed in 2003 in Iraq. See some of his images at www.kavehgolestan.com.
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IRIB’s main radio channel broadcasts around the clock. IRIB also operates a parliamentary network and Radio Koran. Many foreign broadcasters target listeners in Iran. The BBC World’s Persian service is universally popular and easily picked up throughout the country.
Internet
Internet access is easy to arrange and affordable for middle-class Iranians, about 15% of whom have regular access. As such, the web has become the main medium for circumventing the barriers of censorship. Farsi is one of the most used languages in the blogosphere, with bloggers both inside and outside Iran being widely read. Some of these voices were captured in Nasrin Alavi’s 2005 book We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs.
However, life for bloggers contains many of the risks faced by regular Iranian journalists, without any of the financial rewards.