Selfless struggles and the sacrifices of thousands of informed young people, revolutionary intellectuals, and justice-seeking individuals in Iran led to the 1979 revolution that ousted the shah dictatorship. However, Ruhollah Khomeini and the opportunistic mullahs, and their self-serving agents uprooted the seeds of freedom and hope for a better tomorrow from Iran. This uprooting, on one hand, came at the cost of the lives of thousands of young girls and free women who cried out for freedom in prisons, torture chambers, and in front of firing squads. On the other hand, it resulted in the impoverishment and oppression of millions of our compatriots. Until today, both sides of this epic-tragedy continue to unfold across Iran. The usurpation of the rights of the Iranian people after the rule of the mullahs had such devastating consequences that it still astonishes and bewilders people around the world. How is it possible that in a land where its population enjoys multiple natural and underground resources, millions of its people live in poverty and destitution, with their future becoming worse than its present?
Now let’s look at the current situation of poverty and deprivation endured by the oppressed people of Iran under the warmongering regime. The decline of the economy has accelerated during the government of Iranian regime president Ebrahim Raisi to an unprecedented level.
On April 11, the state-run Khabar Online news website wrote, “The thirteenth government came to power with grand slogans, but its two-year performance demonstrates that in practice, the economic crises have become more severe than before, and the problems are more pronounced than ever.”
Wages of thousands of workers spent on suppression
After the widespread corruption of the cleric Kazem Seddiqi and his embezzlement schemes came to light, a comparison between the financial resources at his disposal and the livelihood of deprived workers in Iran gave a glimps of the plundering carried out by the regime’s supporting mafia.
On April 8, Iran Open Data Platform wrote, “In the 2023 budget bill, an amount of 1.27 trillion rials from public resources has been allocated to the ‘Committee for Prevention of vice and promotion of virtue’. Meanwhile, the minimum base salary for workers in the past year was determined to be 53 million rials per month. In other words, last year’s budget for the said Committee was equivalent to the minimum base salary of 24,000 workers per month. From 2017 to 2023, nearly 3.6 trillion rials from the country’s public resources have been allocated to the ‘Committee’. In today’s rates, it exceeds 8 trillion rials.”
It is interesting that the budget of the “Committee for Prevention of vice and promotion of virtue” is several times larger than the allocations of many educational and research institutions. For example, the budget of this institution is approximately four times the budget of the Institute for Research and Planning in Higher Education, which is responsible for planning and developing higher education programs nationwide.
Construction of new prisons
One of the consequences of impoverishing the people of Iran is the alarming growth of social harms, where the repressive regime led by Khamenei targets the most deprived segments of society by imprisoning and executing them. The regime allocates a large portion of the country’s resources to building prisons and places of torture and oppression, instead of expanding education, employment, and healthcare. Currently, the Prison Organization in Iran is busy building 70 new prisons and detention centers throughout the country, which are expected to be operational by 2026.
On January 15, Iran Open Data Platform wrote, “The 2023 budget law includes at least 12 items under the title ‘Construction of Detention Centers,’ with a total allocation of over 11.28 trillion rials for this year. Additionally, two general items titled ‘Construction of 59 Detention Centers’ and ‘Construction of 100 Temporary Detention Centers’ are included in the planned budget, but there is no detailed information available about them.”
The clerical regime of Iran, like its dictatorial predecessors, is not sustainable. Every corruption case will only fuel the determination of the Iranian people to overthrow this regime and establish a democratic republic.
