A moment of protest by young Iranians against the death of Mahsa Amini in Tehran, September 19, 2022 (Getty Images)
Cecilia Sala explains it in her reportage book dedicated to Iranian, Ukrainian and Afghan twenty-year-olds
What distinguishes today’s 20-year-olds in Iran from the generations before them is their economic independence from the country’s regime, which is also a major employer. Therefore, to fully understand the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini that began a year ago, we must also consider the problems of Iran’s economy and their impact on younger people. Cecilia Sala explains it in the book The Fire, recently published by Mondadori, dedicated to twenty-year-olds living in three countries of the world that have been very present on the front pages of newspapers in recent years: Iran, Ukraine and Afghanistan.
Sala has traveled to the three countries about which he reports in his articles in Il Foglio, in his stories on Instagram and in the podcast Chora Media Stories several times and has achieved a very large fan base with the recently created journalistic formats. His book, an excerpt of which we are publishing, collects the personal stories of many people he met and spoke to in the course of his work. On Sunday September 24th at 5 p.m. he will also speak in Faenza as part of Talk about it, the days of meetings organized by the Post Office to talk about how things are going around us; with her will be the deputy director Francesco Costa.
***
Iran is producing many more highly skilled young people than its stagnating economy can accommodate. The state hires some and then tasks them with tasks that are often far removed from those they dreamed of when they began their studies, and with gross domestic product dwindling year after year, new jobs are still few and far between. The exclusion of young people from the traditional economy has created a mass of people who do not rely on the state to pay their rent: the protesting generation is the same one that in recent years has separated its working destiny from the regime economy. It was a mandatory choice because there was little room in the tangle of pseudo-private foundations of the clergy and the Pasdaran. The Iranian economy is an oligopoly in the hands of the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards, and the place best to understand it is Mashhad, to the east towards the border with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. It is nicknamed “the hidden capital” because it is the city of leaders. It was there that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi were born, and it is from this point on the map that power radiates in Iran today.
Until a few years ago, Raisi was at the head of one of the Mashhad foundations that form the “parallel state” and control the country’s GDP. The Foundation of the Oppressed and Disabled alone manages more resources than the Ministry of Finance and the Raisi-ruled Astan Quds Razavi has twenty billion dollars in assets, owns pharmaceutical companies and carpet factories, newspapers and insurance companies, as well as the license to produce Coca-Cola (Khoshgovar) in Country.
The grandparents and parents of those who publicly took to the streets in September with words, Molotov cocktails, loose hair and kisses are state employees or women and men who work for the “private” companies of the holding foundations. For all of them, protesting would mean risking losing their jobs in the midst of an ongoing crisis and therefore having little hope of finding a new one.
70 percent of Iranians are under 35 years old and are in a different state because the Ayatollahs’ economic machinery is blocked: young people were already excluded from this system, which for decades gave the citizens of the Islamic Republic a salary. It is a generation that had to fend for itself, and so Tapsi, the most widespread car sharing service in Iran, was born in 2016, then AloPeyk, a delivery app, and Bdood, a bike sharing app, and Aparat, the local one Youtube. And also Digikala for selling and buying clothes online and Zarinpal for quick digital payments. Up to the online aggregators that allow anyone to offer or offer tutoring in English, mathematics, computer science and guitar lessons, to go cleaning or shopping, to cook, to take care of the cat or the plants. There are also those who have created brands of handmade jewelry, clothing, “reinterpreted” Persian carpets and metal design objects that they sell through local apps or on Instagram. By working in a self-governing economy, they are less dependent on the ayatollahs since they do not receive their salaries from them.
If you exclude high school students, the mix of protesters and independent business workers is nearly identical. The message boards on the social networks of startup founders, such as that of one of the most famous, Hessam Armandehi, the inventor of Iran’s Uber Divar, were full of calls for the release of their employees during the months of protest. Their photos are attached to the posts: They are all in their twenties or a little older and were all arrested at a demonstration. The connection was clear from the start, so much so that the head of Pasdaran’s telecommunications department called for “action against private start-ups” immediately after the first demonstrations.
The new Iranians have created from scratch a parallel and self-sufficient economy in which they are often both workers and customers, angering the regime because it is beyond its control and because it has trained the first generation of citizens who are not prepared for it depend on the life of the ayatollahs, i.e. the condition for an uprising.
© 2023 Mondadori Libri SpA, Milan
– Also read: In Iran, the attempted revolution has turned into resistance
Continue with the post