29 Mar 2024
Tuesday 15 August 2017 - 16:36
Story Code : 272433

Iran, sanctions and women

Iran, sanctions and women
American Herald Tribune | Tim Anderson: Tehran's extraordinary Nature Bridge - a 270m membrane structure designed by young Iranian woman architect Leila Araghian and which links city pedestrians between two parks - illustrates several notable features of contemporary Iran.

First, the country shows a unique cultural development which blend the traditional and the modern; second women professionals are engaged with that innovation; and third, an economic and propaganda war still rages against the independent nation.

The 'nature bridge' has won several awards, but Araghian was not allowed to enter the World Architecture Festival because of sanctions against Iran. Her bridge is part of a much larger green belt development in this polluted mega-city.

The nuclear deal of 2015 (JCPOA, or Barjam in Iran) basically exchanged external supervision of Iran's nuclear industry in return for relief from sanctions. It was an extraordinary, multilateral attempt to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, by limiting and imposing surveillance on the entirety of the country's nuclear energy and nuclear science. Such an effort was not made when Israel, Pakistan and India acquired their nuclear weapons. Further, Iran has never admitted to having a nuclear weapons program, pointing to a religious denunciation of such weapons.

Many Iranians saw Iran's adherence to the JCPOA as a humiliating concession. A postgraduate international relations student told me there seemed no benefits for Iran. However the deal lifted UN Security Council sanctions and, despite ongoing sanctions from the US Congress, Iran's foreign investment and exports have since risen.

The determination of Washington to punish Iran has nothing to do with 'human rights' pretexts. Economic and propaganda warfare comes from fear of the strategic role of the most powerful independent country in the region. Who has most helped arm the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance against Israeli aggression? Who defends secular Syria from the Saudi-backed sectarian terrorists? Who draws attention to the dirty war in Yemen? It is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran's strategic role cannot be explained away as Shia sectarianism, or a 'Shia Crescent' project (the Saudi term for their own nightmare), as there are few Shia Muslims in Palestine, Syria or Yemen. Indeed, Iran (like Syria but unlike the Saudis) has always sheltered Armenian Christians from sectarian Islamists. Christianity is protected in Iran, while it is publicly banned in Saudi Arabia. The one religious minority repressed in Iran is the Baha'is. The government believes they try to convert Muslims and are deeply suspicious of their links to Israel.

What Washington and Israel fear most is losing regional influence to a bloc led by Iran. Henry Kissinger recently said as much when he spoke of fears that the fall of ISIS-DAESH would lead to the rise of an Iranian 'empire'.

Within the Islamic Republic, however, there are two distinct political factions: traditionalists, closer to the theocratic side of the state and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and 'Islamic reformist liberals' led by President Hassan Rouhani and his 'Moderation and Development Party', which has a majority in the National Assembly. The traditionalists, called 'principlists', have conservative as well as nationalist values; but they have also been creative. Their leaders have been prominent in urban and strategic planning, and in education. Imam Sadiq University, for example, was set up by cleric Mohammad-Reza Mahdavi Kani to synthesise traditional social sciences with Islamic thought. The international relations students I spoke with there were not hopeful about their future employment with the more liberal Rouhani government. It was the 'principlist' Mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who initiated the green belts inside and around Tehran. Ghalibaf, a former police chief and army officer, lost to Rouhani in this year's presidential elections.

Many of the liberals, for their part, make a virtue out of their engagement with western states and open market policies. As the recent elections show, they have quite strong popular support, particularly from the large middle classes, in large part due to their promise to improve economic conditions. However liberal MPs recently attracted criticism as they clamoured for 'selfies' with the EU's Federica Mogherini, one of the JCPOA negotiators, when she attended the second term swearing in of President Rouhani. Many see the nuclear deal as a humiliation.

While the two factions are not destabilising, there are important differences in strategic and economic policy. Leader Imam Khamenei, who has a constitutional role in strategy, had a dim view of the impositions of the nuclear 'discussions' and has called for a 'resistance economy'. President Rouhani avoids this theme, presenting a more optimistic view of the agreement and of western engagement. Nevertheless, US analyst Amir Toumaj notes that both leaders share a concern that economic health remains the government's 'top priority. Greater debate over economic policy has led to the creation of new academic centres, such as the Faculty of Economics and the Governance and Policy Think Tank at Sharif University.

The leader's 'resistance economy' idea is to boost foreign investment in energy and the 'knowledge economy' through investment from local sources and strategic partners (Russia, China, Latin America). This approach share some features with the Latin American ALBA group, led by Cuba and Venezuela. Economic liberalisation under President Rouhani has included a proliferation of private banks, a push for foreign tourism and shifting social support away from a subsidy structure towards a more targeted welfare system.

That social support has kept poverty fairly low, even when incomes were low and unemployment rose, especially after 2010 under the multilateral sanctions regime. Yet the UNDP acknowledges that Iran's Human Development Index (HDI) improved by 35% between 1990 and 2014, with average schooling rising from 9.2 to 15.1 years. Youth literacy is 97%, with no gender disparity.

Of course, sanctions hit ordinary people the hardest, alongside the serious currency instability and devaluation. The rebound in economic growth in 2016 was mostly in the energy sector and has not yet brought about a real decrease in the 12% unemployment rate, double that for youth.

Nevertheless, the rebound is set to continue. The Economist predicts an average Iranian growth rate of 5.6% per year over 2017-2021. That can flow on to ordinary people, given appropriate policies. Investment from China, Russia and Europe will compensate for the lack of US investment. Iran would then be in a better position to develop its leadership of the region. This is 'destabilising' mainly in the sense that US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia would lose influence.

In line with the propaganda wars over the region, and with Washington facing defeat of its 'New Middle East' project in both Syria and Iraq, the western media bombards us with stories about the role of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The country is said to be a 'medieval' and repressive state.

Sharia law does apply in many areas, where there is clear Quranic reference. Homosexuality is a crime but, contrary to a western myth, people are not executed for it. The death penalty does apply for rape, murder and espionage. Where there is no clear Quranic reference, there is more flexible jurisprudence. Transgender people, for example, are regarded as suffering from a condition and are offered free re-assignment surgery.

But Iran is not Saudi Arabia. It is certainly the case that women are required to wear a head-scarf. However, unlike the Gulf monarchies, virtually no Iranian women cover their face in public and (unlike Arab hijabis) most in the major cities show their hair. They go out without escorts, drive cars and enter all the professions.

The Washington-based World Bank has engaged with the anti-Iran narrative, through partisan economic data. It claims that labour force participation levels for women in Iran are only 18.1%, against a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) average of 21.1 and a world average of 39.4 in 2017. However this figure is at the bottom of a range of estimates, which the Middle East Institute in 2009 reported as between 18.5% and 24.6%, and then an even higher figure.

Outside these labour force estimates, some western sources report an informal sector for women dominated by low skilled jobs for uneducated women in rural areas, often as unpaid family workers in producing carpets and handicraft. However, as Professor Fatemeh Moghadam points out, this was the position before the 1979 Revolution. She says women's work in Iran is 'undercounted' and that at 2009 they constituted 'about 40% of agricultural labour', with a large number of well educated women in the informal sector and professions.

Moghadam's analysis is backed up by Roksana Bahramitash and Hadi Esfahani (2008 and 2011), who say that education and structural change in Iran have 'fundamentally transformed the nature of female labour force participation and employment'. In particular, there has been 'an increasingly larger proportion of educated women ... in professional positions in urban areas'. That represents a significant advance over the position of women under the US-backed Shah's regime. Well educated and westernised women then were a tiny elite.

The root of the improvements in women's work lies in education, including higher education. Golnar Mehran in her 2003 paper 'The Paradox of Tradition and Modernity in Female Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran', pointed out that female education peaked after the Islamic Revolution. Between 1976 and 2001 gender equity in Iran's primary and secondary education improved considerably, from about 60/40 (male-female) in 1976 to 52-48 in 2001. By 2000-2001 women comprised 61% of university students (Mehran 2003: 280). Iran's 93% female enrolment, she added 'far exceeds the Middle East and North Africa regional average'. But you won't get that from the World Bank; and you won't see it in Saudi Arabia.
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