Turnout In 2024 Iranian Elections May Be As Low As 15 Percent

As the only official representative of Tiandy in Iran, Radi Vira Tejarat Company imports and sells surveillance equipment to government security outfits such as the Revolutionary Guard, its Basij paramilitary force and the police.

Earlier, NBC news in a report investigated Tiandy's cooperation with Iran's security and military institutions that helps them to identify protesters.

According to the report, Tiandy, as one of the four major suppliers of surveillance cameras in China, has signed a five-year contract with the Iranian security and intelligence organizations.

Last month, Washington placed Tiandy on its sanctions list for selling surveillancecameras to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and also the use of its technology in suppressing Uyghur Muslims.

The European Union says Radis Vira Tejarat is a key intermediary in providing the most advanced surveillance equipment for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Tiandy is a private firm based in the northern city of Tianjin, which ranks among the top video surveillance companies in China and the world.

An industry survey says the annual sales revenue of Tiandy was more than $800 million in 2021 with branches in over 60 countries.

Criticizing the insistence of hard-liners on hijab, Azar Mansouri, the female leader of reformist Unity of Nation Party in Iran has argued that the reason why Iranian women burned their headscarves during the recent protests is that the government tried to impose a certain dress code on them in the name of religion.

She said in an article in Etemad newspaper that those who made this mistake did not understand that Islam came to give dignity to all human beings regardless of their gender. "What you are doing is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on," Mansouri told Iranian officials.

Mansouri said people remember viral videos before the protests that started in mid-September, in which a woman was begging the morality police not to arrest her ailing daughter, or many other videos that showed the police's brutality while arresting women for not fully respecting the dress code the government imposed on the people. "Mahsa Amini's death in custody flared up a fire that was under the ashes," Mansouri said in a statement that was identical with what centrist commentator Sadeq Zibakalam had said the previous day.

Mansouri quoted Iranian scholars as saying that "The Woman, Life, Freedom movement started as a result of accumulated dissatisfactions and the widening divides between the government and the Iranian society. She warned that the uprising could still re-emerge.

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The politician expressed hope that the government will adopt a realistic policy about how to deal with the people and will start serious legal and structural reforms. However, she warned that what people hear from official podiums erodes any hope in reforms. She pointed out the arrest of Iranian artists for removing their hijab and heavy sentences for them, as well as the killing of many young men and women during the protests as an indication that reforms are unlikely in Iran.

Opposition to the government's heavy-handed approach to enforcing hijab and punishing detained protesters has been on the rise during the past days even by some Muslim clerics. Mohammad Ashrafi-Esfahani has said that "Executions carried out following recent protests are not based on sound legal foundations." He also pointed out that "many top clerics are silent about it because they think no one in the government will care for their attestations."

However, Ashrafi-Esfahani stopped short of saying that many top clerics fear retribution by the government if they speak against the hardliners who control the government and the Judiciary system and are supported by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Nonetheless, the cleric said: "It might help if the leader in a bid to calm the situation tells the Judiciary to deal with prisoners compassionately. This will also be a good publicity for the Islamic Republic."

In her article in Etemad, Ms. Mansouri observed that Iranian women have expressed their opposition to the dress code imposed by the government all along in the past four decades. They have also objected to discrimination against women under the Islamic Republic. But nobody paid any attention to their grievances. She argued that there were no serious confrontations between women and the government until hardliners boldly introduced the morality police.

In the meantime, she said, a government-imposed glass ceiling prevented Iranian women's access to equal rights with men in the areas of education and employment. She concluded that it was this unfair treatment of women and ignoring their rights that triggered their revolt in September and what is now known as the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement.

Islamic Republic’s education minister says parts of the documents obtained during the US embassy takeover in 1979 will be included in school textbooks as of next year.

Yousef Nouri said Sunday that the move was done upon a call by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the materials will be included in textbooks in all levels from the elementary school to the end of high school according to the level of understanding of the students. 

He said that Khamenei urged the measure in a meeting with a group of students on November 2, 2022. Schoolbooks in Iran carry a heavy load of the regime ideology, with history re-written to fit its narrative, similar to what Communist regimes did in the 20th century.

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According to Fars news agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, after the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran by revolutionary students, they “found documents there that showed American conspiracies against the Iranian nation," adding that the data extracted from the documents are compiled in 70 to 80 volumes of books.

According to an article published by The Washington Post in January 1982, hundreds of highly sensitive documents were captured and reconstructed after the embassy takeover. There were other documents that reportedly have not been deciphered or have been withheld from public consumption. “Although those published do not support the more egregious conspiracy theories of the militants, they have been used in an intensive campaign to arouse further distrust of the United States.”

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The published documents, most of which have been authenticated by US sources, detail the US estimates of the regime of the late shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the forces which toppled him and the struggle to preserve American influence in Iran.

An article by the New York Times on July 10, 1986, said the documents were published under the title “Documents From the Espionage Den," the name the Islamic Republic uses for the US embassy. The books are sold openly in Tehran bookshops and included photocopies of the original telexes, mailgrams and typed letters from the embassy, classified reports, commentaries from the "students," and their complete translations into Persian.

Among the papers were shredded secret documents pieced back together by the attackers that detailed attempts of the Central Intelligence Agency to recruit high-level Iranian officials, ayatollahs, foreign journalists and diplomats as well as other CIA contacts either as paid or "unwitting” agents in the months after the revolution. “The documents shed light on the CIA's apparently unsuccessful attempt to recruit the former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, in the months just before the embassy takeover, when he was a member of the ruling Revolutionary Council and head of the Central Bank," said the article. 

Some of the documents suggested that some of the members of the embassy's staff had been working with the CIA. Later, the CIA confirmed its role and that of MI6 in Operation Ajax -- the 1953 Iranian coup d'état that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The regime is expected to embed a heavy dose of its anti-American propaganda in the textbooks claiming it is substantiated by the embassy documents.

Earlier in the month, the Islamic Republic announced its intention to change the content of textbooks in foreign language schools after criticism by Khamenei. Head of Non-Governmental Schools and Centers Ahmad Mahmoudzadeh told ILNA Sunday that “We will have a call to produce content of language books for schools, which will be implemented in line with the order of the Supreme Leader.” "Language books that have nothing to do with our culture will be discarded," he added. Changing the content of textbooks based on the government's propaganda policies has been implemented in the last few years upon the order of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. However, this is the first time that these changes will be applied to the language teaching books of private institutes.

In August, the education minister said that 200 schoolbooks of the country’s education system will be revised as ordered by the Supreme Leader.

President Ebrahim Raisi Sunday defended the bill at the parliament by a rhetorical statement, "The strategy of the enemy is to create despair, while the strategy of the government and the parliament should be to create hope in the hearts of the people." The deficit in the current budget that the government admits is about 4,760 trillion rials – more than ten billion dollars. But the real deficit will be perhaps twice as much, with rosy estimates of oil sales and staggering tax collection.

As the bill was being approved, the Iranian currency rial hit a new historic low, dropping to 455,000 against the US dollar. But that did not deter Raisi from claiming that Iran is witnessing “a very bright future,” citing data supposedly indicating that the country’s economy grew in the past year.

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He claimed that "this year the country is witnessing an economic growth of four percent," adding that "a million jobs have been created in the country." When he presented the outlines of the budget, he had claimed that economic growth in this budget would be eight percent.

According to an International Monetary Fund report, economic growth will decrease from four percent in the previous Iranian year to three percent in the current year and two percent in the next year. That is still an estimate based on figures mainly supplied by the Iranian government.

Meanwhile, Gholamhossein Shafei, the head of Iran's Chamber of Commerce, said last year that the country's economic growth has been zero in the past 10 years.

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The budget bill that was submitted to parliament more than a month late, places its hope on exporting 1.4 million barrels of oil per day, a lofty goal given that US sanctions are in place and Tehran is exporting less than a million barrels under current conditions. The budget also estimates that each barrel of oil can be sold at $85, while that is the highest price in global market, but Iran has to give steep discounts to ship illicit cargoes to its main buyer, China.

The total tax revenues planned in the draft budget will surpass $20 billion based on the current rate of exchange. In Iranian currency, however, this is a staggering 8.3 quadrillion rials – that is with 15 zeros.

Despite the huge tax bill for the people, the government budget will still have a 50-percent deficit, due to a chaotic downturn in the economy mainly triggered by US sanctions on its oil exports and international banking.

The 59-percent jump in planned tax collection means that taxpayers have to pay at least 10 percent more than the estimated 50-percent annual inflation rate.

The Raisi administration started with a rate of exchange for US dollars of 250,000 rials which has so far risen to over 450,000 rials.

Inflation in the country has soared to over 50%, the highest level in decades. Youth unemployment remains high with over 50% of Iranians being pushed below the poverty line, according to reports by Iran's Statistical Center.

The Iranian currency rial has lost its value by more than elevenfold in five years, making imports of food and other essential necessities equally expensive for consumers.

Last week, Mehdi Abbasi and Nasser Amani, two members of Tehran City Council, had emphasized that they would publish the list on Saturday, but mayor Alireza Zakani once again announced, “we are not responsible for publishing the list of unsafe buildings, but we will give it to the legal authorities.”

Meanwhile, lawmaker Mohammad Hasan Asafari told the ILNA news agency that "announcing the names of these buildings can have a psychological effect and make people anxious, so there is no need to create such fears in the society."

Earlier, in November Alireza Zakani said “If we release the list, no one will stay in Tehran anymore.”

The list of 129 unsafe buildings in Tehran became a hot topic about five years ago, after the Plasco incident.

The Plasco Building was a 20-story high-rise that collapsed on January 19, 2017 after it caught fire. Twenty firefighters were reportedly killed and at least 70 others were injured by the collapse. Another major building collapse in Khuzestan province last year, made the issue of identifying unsafe buildings an urgent matter.

IRNA state news agency reported in June that there are currently "33,000 unsafe buildings" in Tehran.