Analysis by PMOI/MEK
March 30, 2019 – The heavy rainfall that began on Sunday, March 17, 2019 in the northern cities of Iran, caused the cities and villages of provinces like Golestan, Mazandaran, Northern Khorasan and Semnan to become engulfed with water due to the devastating policies of the Iranian regime in response to natural disasters. Many Iranians lost their lives or their belongings at the beginning of the Persian New Year. Tens of thousands became homeless and many people are faced with heavy financial losses in these provinces. Dozens of villages have gone underwater, and thousands of people are spending their terrible days without any shelter in this bad weather conditions.
In February, heavy flood damages in six provinces and the destruction of dozens of towns and villages during the disaster that was already anticipated by the meteorologists was reflected in news and media. In this catastrophe which was also warned by the weather forecasters, 20 provinces of Yazd, Mazandaran, Lorestan, Golestan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyerahmad, Kermanshah, Kurdistan, Qazvin, Fars, Semnan, Zanjan, Khuzestan, South Khorasan, Char Mahal and Bakhtiari, Bushehr, Ardebil, Alborz, Ilam, West and East Azarbaijan were exposed to flood, storm, snow and blizzard. People threw out one of the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards from their city who had come to the region to take pictures of the disaster. This shows how much people hate the IRGC and regime officials.
The governors of these cities didn’t even showed up to see what had happened to their provinces and cities. Nobody came to visit these desperate people.
Where is the governor?
As the flood destroyed thousands of homes and devastated families, and the people’s holidays became mournful, the absence of the governor of Golestan attracted public and media attention.
After the regime’s media investigation, it became clear that the governor of Gulistan, Manaf Hashemi, had traveled abroad with the permission of the Interior Minister right after the flood.
What happens to the budget for preserving the environment and preventing natural disasters?
Flood is the increasing level of water in the rivers which is occupying a part of a land or a river’s margin and distributes debris here and there. This increased water can cause the region to get engulfed with flood and make irreparable damage to buildings and facilities. It also may cause animal and human casualties. In some cases, the flood is due to increase in the level of lake or sea, in which extreme winds will be affected.
During rain and snow, some of the water is absorbed by the soil and plants, some percentage evaporates, and the remainder flows, which is called the runoff. Floods when soil and plants cannot absorb precipitation and, as a result, the natural channels of the river can’t drain the water.
River floods are often caused by extreme rainfall, which in some cases it is associated with melting snow.
Flooding can be resisted with the restoration of forests and constructing floodgates, dams, reservoirs, flood channels and permanent dredging. But the question is that what happens to the money which is supposed to be spent for making these infrastructures?
Iran floods, March 2019
Increased suppression budget
In order to study the causes of such devastating damages that a rainfall has caused in a vast area of the north, the first factor we must understand is the plundering of the Iranian people’s wealth by the mullahs’ regime and the squandering of wealth that should be used to defend the cities and people against earthquakes and floods.
Looking at the budget of the government of Hassan Rouhani for the year 1398 (2019-2020), we can notice that the money paid out by the people for taxes and revenues is used directly for the expenses of institutes affiliated to Revolutionary Guards or the suppression of the same people who are also losing their lives and properties in recent flooding.
State-run Entekhab website wrote on December 25:
“The share of The Joint Staff of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was 236,197 million tomans (approx. $23.6 million), which will reach up to 471,864 million tomans (approx. $47.2 million) next year [2019]. The budget of the Basij Organization has also increased for the next year. The status of the budget for delegation of Jurisprudent in IRGC has also improved in the proposed bill of the next year. This institution received 102,198.5 million tomans in the year of 2018 which has been increased to 114,139 million tomans for the next year. The budget of headquarters of Rahian-e-nur which is 22,330 million tomans this year, will be increased to 25,000 million tomans next year. Also, For the headquarters of Khatamolanbia [large IRGC industrial complex] 335,800 million tomans has been predicted in the budget plan of next year, while this figure was 259,000 million tomans this year [2018]. “
The National Cybersecurity Center’s budget which was set up to create diversion, counterfeiting, censorship and confrontation with young people, increased by 21 billion tomans. The same governmental media added:
“The National Cyber Space Center, which was established in 2011 with the decree of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, had a budget of 24 billion tomans this year, but this budget has been increased in the budget bill of 2019 to 45.35 billion tomans.”
If a percentage of these funds, which comes directly from people’s pocket and is used against the people themselves, was used to build floodgates, dams, reservoirs and flood canals the result would be different from what we see today.
What happened to the share of the environment?
With some rainfall in the year of 2016, we witnessed flooding in three provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan, Fars and Kerman. During this flood, five cities of Shiraz, Darab, Sardouei, Sibsouran and Iranshahr were damaged and filled with water.
Also, years before and after this incident, we witnessed other floods and big financial and deadly damages that could have been prevented with a little attention and planning. While one of the most important problems of people in the present time is the lack of water and the drought problem, they could be solved with some simple plans and paying attention to environmental difficulties. Thus, these problems could be controlled, and the burden could be lifted. But the question is, where is the Iranian regime contribution to the environment?
One of the centers where a big portion of budget is allocated every year is the clerical seminaries. These institutions are special places managed with the state expenses in which the mullahs are taught clerical lessons in order to expand their ideology and the Law of Shari’a in Iran and the countries of the region. Thus, they can provide an ideological and mental station for terrorism and suppression in countries across the world.
According to state-run ISNA news agency on December 25, 2018: “The estimated budget for the Supreme Council of seminaries was a 3,000 billion rials.
The estimated budget for the Clerical Institution Service Center is 10,417,000 million rials from the proposed budget bill in 2019. The contribution of the Clerical Institutions Service center would be 6,961,000 million rials, the contribution of the Clerical Institution Service Center, the premium of clerics and unemployed clerics would be 3,456,000 million rials, and 60,450 million rials goes to the library of Ayatollah Marashi Najafi.
The estimated budget for the Jameatomostafa assembly for the next year is 2,017,000 million rials and for Imam Sadiq University is 80,000 million rials.
The estimated budget for the Policy Council of female cleric institutes are appraised at 1,697,000 million rials in 2019 budget bill.”
Five years ago, The Director General of the Gonbad-e-Kavos water field said in an interview in the flood-stricken province of Golestan with a gesture of trying to solve the flood problems: “It is predicted that 530 million rials will be allocated for the dredging operations of these rivers.” (ISNA News Agency on August 5, 2014)
If we only compare the 530 million rials credit allocated for dredging, which has been plunged directly into the pockets of the regime’s agents, with the 3,456,000 million rials paid for the premiums of the pupils and unemployed clerics, then everything would be clear.
According to the website of Statistics Center of Iran (Dargah Amar), the province of Golestan was populated by 1,868,819 people including 550,249 households in 2017. If we divide 3,456 million rials (which is officially and legally is paid to the unemployed clerics and their insurance costs) between the households of province of Golestan, each household will receive 628,079 rials. In this estimation, which is calculated with numbers of official governmental media, the contribution of each person in the province would be nearly 2 million rials.
In other words, the credit allocated for the government clerics was enough to dredge the area mentioned by the Director General of the Gonbad-e-Kavos water field seven times.
Iran floods, March 2019
Comparing the budget of environment with that of religious institusions
Religious institutions such as the Service Center for the Cleric Institutions, the Islamic Advertising Organization, the Supreme Council of Cleric Institutes, the Jameatomostafa Assembly, the Female Clerics Policy making Council, the Islamic Advertising Office of Cleric institutions of Qom, the jurisprudent delegation in revolutionary Guards, the Khomeini Research Institute, the Khomeini Education and Research Center, headquarters of virtue police (Amr be Marruf va nahy az monker) and the Khomeini Publishing House have a collective budget that amounts to 3,351 billion tomans, while the total budget for preserving the environment around the country is 403 billion tomans. This is supposed to solve all the country’s ecological problems such as drought, air pollution, flood, forests, marshes, drought of wetlands, drying of lakes and so on. It means that the budget of propaganda for special institutions of the system is 8.5 times larger than the total budget of the environment and has nothing to do with the lives of the Iranian people and their day-to-day problems.
In this regard, the deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency of the regime revealed a part of Iran’s environmental degradation in a shocking example and told news media that Iran has 16 million tons of soil erosion each year, which is 6-8 million tons above the global average.
“Iran is on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Iran’s corrupt leaders have gravely mismanaged Iran’s water resources for 40 years, lining their pockets on useless projects instead of serving the interests of its citizens. Iranian people deserve better,” the U.S. State Department tweeted on World Water Day.
Estimated flood damage
According to the latest estimation, which is still very raw and shows just a small part of the situation, the flood disaster in the provinces of Golestan, North Khorasan, Mazandaran, and Semnan has caused extensive damage. Villages have been submerged in water, communication routes have been blocked, livestock have been wasted, and many of the people of the flood-stricken regions have lost their lives. The situation is especially bad in Golestan province. This disaster has brought grief for the desperate people in these areas on New Year’s Eve. The Iranian regime has declared the casualties of the flood at 44. But in Shiraz alone, locals have reported more than 120 dead.
Government sources do not correctly report the size of the damage and casualties. However, a government official in Golestan province acknowledged that 70 percent of the city of Aq Qala was covered with water, and 12 villages have gone underwater and there was no possibility to provide relief efforts.
In more than 70 villages of this province, communication routes are broken down and there is a power outage in about 50 villages. According to the governmental media, 10,000 residential houses in province of Golestan were affected by flood and 23,000 tribal households in the eastern Golestan were surrounded by water. In the cities of Neka and Behshahr, the communication routs between 70 villages are closed because of the snow and blizzard.
The solution
Looking at the torment and suffering of the desperate people during the days of Nowruz, we can see that the main cause of corruption, looting and systematic plundering is the government itself, which is squandering the country’s wealth on suppressing the people or for censorship and advertising the reactionary ideology and the Revolutionary Guards. They have destroyed the lives of the people and driven the beautiful nature of Iran to the brink of extermination. We can also see that the jurisprudential system has no solutions for the problems other than suppression and doesn’t have the intention to resolve any of the difficulties. When any social harm or environmental problem is announced, it directly leads to the rule of religious fascism which is determined to sacrifice the Iranian nation to preserve its own power and the rule of this dictatorship.
Experience from the past year showed that the basic solution for solving all the environmental, social and political crises in this area is the overthrow of the corrupt regime of Iran, which has taken its toll on the beautiful Iranian nation and its proud people.
