Analysis by PMOI/MEK
Iran, April 20, 2021—Mohsen Hashemi Rafsanjani, a member of Tehran’s city council announced on Tuesday, April 13, that the “Mafia of Garbage” exploits 14,000 homeless people in Tehran, including small children.
Rafsanjani called the current situation of these children “an unsolved issue” and “a growing plague” that has become a source of income for organized economic gangs. Unsurprisingly, these gangs are closely related to regime officials and institutions.
“The ‘Mafia of Garbage’ uses the homeless street children as workers, which caused much damage to the society,” Hashemi said.
According to research in 2017, the number of garbage collectors in Tehran is 14,000 people, of which 4,700 are children. Forty percent of these children are completely illiterate, 37 percent have left school and work an average of ten-and-half hours a day.
Reports show that the waste trade is estimated at several trillion rials. The dry waste cycle in Tehran alone is worth about 30 trillion rials per year, of which 70 percent is the share of informal waste collection.
According to the Society of Students Against Poverty, in the last two years, the garbage children collected an average of 60 kg of garbage per day, and most of them sleep in garbage disposal workshops. These workshops are usually on the outskirts of the city and lack the most basic sanitation facilities. As a result, these children are confronted with various infectious diseases.
In September 2020, the state-run Shahr news website wrote, “In the last few years many contractors have earned billions in their contracts with municipalities to take responsibility for the collection and separation of dry waste.”
On April 12, the state-run IRNA news agency wrote, “According to the statistics of the Labor Ministry in 2017, there are 500,000 working children across country, divided in three categories: workshop workers, street workers, and garbage collectors.”
“The population of street children is incalculable,” IRNA continued and added that according to welfare statistics, there are an estimated 14,000 street worker children in the country.
IRNA also reported that according to non-governmental organizations in Tehran, there are about 4,000 garbage collector children in Tehran.
On March 8, the Aria news agency interviewed a 46-year-old woman who has two children and earns her living collecting garbage in Tehran’s streets. “My husband’s salary is not enough and for my daughter's online education, I bought a 40 million rial (approx. $166) tablet on loan from four people,” she said. A night’s worth of garbage collection earned her 230,000 rials (approx. $0.95).
All of this is happening while Iran is one of the richest countries in the world. But during the last 42 years, Iran’s resources have been plundered by the mullahs’ regime and spent on domestic repression and export of terrorism.
Giant regime-owned institutions such as Astan-e Quds Razavi (AQR) control a large percent of the national wealth and economy, and they spend their assets and astronomical income on terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and other nefarious projects of the mullahs.
Behzad Nabavi, a former government minister in several administrations, said in an interview with the state-run Alef news agency on September 21, 2019, “In our country, there are four institutions which control 60 percent of the national wealth. This includes Executive Headquarters of Imam’s Directive (Setad Ejraie Farman Imam), Khatam-ol-Anbiay Base, Astan-e Quds, and Foundation of the Oppressed and Disabled.”
Nabavi added that none of these institutions are in connection with the government and parliament, which means they are owned by regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his praetorian guard the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).
