Page 44 - Shahrvand BC No.1250

‹ English Section
The Effects of The Economic Sanctions Against Iran 44

by Mina Khanlarzadeh
Jul 26 2013
[A note about the personal stories in the ar-
ticle: The personal stories included in this
article are responses from an online survey
I conducted in Persian about the impact of
the economic sanctions on the public and do-
mestic spheres. The purpose of the survey is
to create a space for the everyday, untold ex-
periences of people currently living under the
conditions of economic sanctions in Iran. For
the privacy of the respondents, their personal
information is not provided.]
Various Iranian feminist groups, anti-war and
sanctions groups, scholars and the American
Campaign for Peace and Democracy have
advocated for the global disarmament of
nuclear weapons in order to end economic
sanctions and threats of war against Iran and
other countries. Iranian activists have pro-
posedthe global employment of energy forms
other than nuclear to prevent ecological di-
sasters in Iran and the rest of the world. Yet,
these suggested egalitarian resolutions are
ignored and the economic sanctions continue
deteriorating living conditions in Iran.
A thirty-five year-old female university lec-
turer from Tehran describes her experiences
as follows:
Last year I was working for a govern-
mental office, but became unemployed
in March 2013. Sanctions have affected
my life mainly in two ways: one are un-
affordable life expenses, and the other is
that my former boss instrumentalized the
sanctions to justify late payments, lack of threaten the lives of Iranians is through a
payments, and harsher work conditions.
He explained that, due to the sanctions,
the budget became tighter. He was right
about the reduced budget, however, the
reduction of the budget was instrumen-
talized by him to unequally distribute
resources among the employees. Hence,
those who politically differed from him
received a greater share of the harshness
of the conditions. The sanctions for me
personally has revealed the shabby hy-
pocrisies in this world much clearer than
before. At this point, my only demand is
a stop to the economic sanctions and the
cruel conditions that have been imposed
on us in Iran.
The History of the Economic Sanctions
Against Iran and their Effects
The employment of economic sanctions
against Iran dates back to the post-1979 Rev-
olution. [1] Starting as bans on the import of
Iranian crude oil into the United States (US),
sanctions later developed into the banning
of all imports of Iranian refined and non-oil
products, followed by an embargo of US
exports in the 1980s. More recently, the en-
actment of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act dur-
ing the presidency of Bill Clinton made it so
any investment in the energy sector of Iran
by the US, such as the oil and gas industries,
was strictly prohibited and (in the original
version) any investment in Iran’s energy
sector by foreign companies for more than
twenty million dollars a year would result in
imposition of the two out of a menu of six
sanctions against those companies by the US.
[2] Further sanctions against Iran’s financial
sector, including Iran’s Central Bank and Te-
jarat Bank, have sought to cut Iran off from
the global financial system and the Society
for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecom-
munication (SWIFT). As a result, oil cus-
tomers can no longer transfer money to Iran
in American dollars, and countries such as
China and India, either pay Iran in their own
currencies, or export products in exchange
for oil (i.e. barter transactions). Added to
the economic sanctions is the Iranian state’s
econo-political corruption, the recent reduc-
tion or removal of subsidies and other anti-
working class economic policies. Overall, the
economic sanctions have contributed to the
depreciation of Iran’s currency and increas-
ing inflation - issues that have impacted the
everyday experiences of working and middle
class Iranians.
Economic sanctions result in the destruc-
tion of people and the creation of worlds ”in
which vast populations are subjected to con-
ditions of life conferring upon them the status
of the living dead.” [3] One direct effect of the timated twenty thousand patients of Thalas-
economic sanctions against Iran has been the
banning of the sale of civilian aircraft. Iran
is prohibited from updating its thirty year-old
American aircrafts, and the purchase of spare
parts from European companies has become
extremely difficult. The consequence of using
old aircrafts has been repeated airplane crash-
es during the last three decades (i.e. thirteen
airplane crashes happened between 2000 and
2011, with at least 1,224 people killed).
A thirty-one year-old male who works as a
salesman at a bookstore in Tehran describes
the current conditions (to which the economic
sanctions have contributed) as follows:
The conditions of these days for me
are as follows: medicines are rare, food
costs an arm and a leg, unemployment is
widespread, the cutting of the subsidies
will continue till doomsday, smugglers
are sheltered, mediators and dealers are
getting fatter and fatter, boss-men and
chief-executives are busy with looting,
and profiteers from the sanctions are
getting richer and richer every day while
the rest of us suffer
Another area that the economic sanctions
scarcity of medicine. Although the sanctions
enacted by the US and the European Union
claim to not impose a shortage on humanitar-
ian trades, in reality, they have immensely af-
fected the delivery and availability of medical
supplies. The sanctions against Iran’s banking
infrastructure and the exclusion of Iran from
the global financial system and SWIFT have
forced Iranian medical companies to use the
old system of hawala (money transfer) for its
transactions, causing the process to become
significantly longer and more expensive. The
depreciation of Iran’s currency has also con-
tributed to shortages and skyrocketing prices
of medicine, and advanced medical technolo-
gies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI) machines and other nuclear medi-
cal devices are banned from entering Iran.
The devastation of those in need of medical
care is illustrated by the image of an ill elder
woman on a bed who had recently protested
the high costs of healthcare and shortages of
medicine in front of the presidential building
in Iran.
The material and equipment used by dentists
have become seven to eight times more ex-
pensive over the past year. As a result, dental
care has become a privilege inaccessible to
the working and middle classes. The overall
outcome of these conditions has been the,
“inability of pharmaceutical companies to
purchase and import basic life saving medi-
cines, ranging from Tylenol to cancer medi-
cine and even prenatal vitamins.” The im-
port of medicines containing antibiotics (of
types that are not produced inside Iran) have
been decreased by 20.7 percent and the price
have been increased by 308 percent. The es-
semia throughout the country receive only a
few days of their monthly medicinal needs,
and several patients with Thalassemia have
died. Chemical weapon survivors, a side-
effect of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, in
need of medicine and equipment, including
cornea transplants and inhalers, similarly
suffer from a shortage or lack of medi-
cine. In essence, the medicines used to treat
Hemophilia, cancer, Thalassemia, Multiple
Sclerosis and transplant and kidney dialysis
are either not produced domestically, or are
produced, but are not as effective as those im-
ported from Europe and North America. The
shortage of medicine for such chronic diseas-
es often leads to death. Hence, a wave of dete-
rioration of living conditions and destruction
has been imposed on Iran by the economic
sanctions, and when this wave reaches the
country, it is unequally distributed among
citizens, i.e. those living in poverty and the
marginalized areas, and outside of the popu-
lar base of the government suffer the effects
of sanctions more.
A twenty-seven year-old male university-
student from Hamedan describes the situation
as such:
Economic sanctions have ruined our
lives. Everybody here thinks about the
sanctions, and hopes that they will be re- of violence. While the relation of power can be
moved due to the upcoming presidential
election {2013 presidential election}.
What is interesting is that most people
don’t know the exact way that sanctions
operate or that sanctions are actually
intensifying as the presidential election
approaches. No one dares go to dentists
anymore. I had a root-canal seven years
ago for fifteen Toman, but it now costs
three hundred thousand Toman. The fa-
mous dentists in the city charge one mil-
lion Toman. Those who care for a sick
person in their home have it even harder
than the rest of us. The medical equip-
ment costs have skyrocketed. Medicine
and medical equipment have declined in
quality. Aluminum is no longer import-
ed to Iran and as a result, wheelchairs,
walkers, and canes have become much
more expensive.
Additionally, a thirty-two year-old female
currently unemployed from Rasht explains
the effects of the economic sanctions in the
following manner:
I was employed at a factory, but it shut
down due to the recent harsh economic 1392 ‫ دادرم‬11 ‫ جمعه‬- 1250 ‫ شماره‬/ ‫سال متسیب‬
sanctions against Iran’s banks and im-
ports. Economic sanctions have nar- In touch with Iranian diversity
rowed the options that I used to have. I
often have to choose one or two among Vol. 20 / No. 1250 - Friday, Aug. 2, 2013
the following: visiting the doctor, buy-
ing medicine, buying clothes, going 44
to the cinema, etc. These days when a
doctor writes you a prescription, before
thinking about the high-price that you
will have to pay, you think about how
many pharmacies you will have to walk
to in order to find the medicine. If you do
find it, you never know what portion of
the medicine you can afford. In the labo-
ratories and radiology offices, health in-
surances one after another get canceled.
You sometimes have to search for words
to find an expression to assuage the pain
of a friend who suffers from Multiple
Sclerosis and is not able to purchase her
medicine that now costs eleven million
Toman per month (the total annual in-
come of all her family members together
is 9,600,000 Toman). The same friend
doesn’t want to visit the doctor again so
she and her family can forget about her
sickness and the desperate reliance on
miracles and God. Listening to such sto-
ries have become part of our daily lives.
Economic Sanctions: The Politics of Mar-
ginalization of Political Dissidents
The violence resulting from economic sanc-
tions against targeted people is falsely framed
as a force that politicizes and revolutionizes
them against their state. Targeted people are
intended to become hyper-political through
their forced exclusion from the political by
making them economically vulnerable. In the
case of economic sanctions, the relation be-
tween the targeted people and their oppressors
is not a relation of power, but rather, a relation
resisted from multiple points and acts on peo-
ple’s actions, the relation of violence doesn’t
leave a space for escape and resistance and
it acts directly on people’s lives, in the case
of economic sanctions, through unavailabil-
ity of basic necessities andconstant threats of
war. [4] As a result, targeted people do not
have the power to challenge and reverse their
relation with their oppressors, and they would
have a much harder time formulating a resis-
tance that would turn relations of violence
into relations of power. [5] The oppressors
are not one entity against whom the targeted
people are easily able to revolt. Instead, the
forces of economic sanction imposition are a
complicated composition of international and
domestic powers and beneficiaries. As a re-
sult, economic sanctions make the criticism
of domestic economic policies and corruption
harder. Having become economically more
vulnerable by sanctions and threats of war,
the demands of considerable sections of the
society have been narrowed to the reduction,
or preferably removal, of the economic sanc-
tions and a stop to the threats of war, i.e. the
right of the world powers’ invasion of Iran.
The US-European sanctions against Iran have
assisted the Iranian state in positing itself as
an anti-imperialist entity, resisting the unjust
global relations, while simultaneously being
part of the same global relations in regulating
anti-working class economic policies, receiv-
ing praises from the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and deepening
class divisions in Iran. The notion of foreign
intervention, i.e. the economic sanctions and
the threats of war against Iran, has assisted
the government to articulate a discourse of
national reconciliation without enacting any
meaningful recognition of alternative politi-
cal voices and demands. The threats of war
and deteriorating living conditions, due to
economic sanctions, have marginalized the
voices that demand structural econo-political
changes and reform of laws. It is impossible
to lead a good life under the economic sanc-
tions, hence the state does not need to nego-
tiate with political dissidents or recognize