Posts tagged : "Iran"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: On Friday, Iranian families will mark the winter solstice, the longest, darkest night of the year. Yalda festivities are usually a time to recite poems and feast on cured meats and fresh fruit, especially the pomegranate. But this year sanctions have kept the precious fruit on vendors’ shelves – its price is out of reach for many grappling with the flailing economy. In the northern Iranian city of Rasht, fruit vendor Farshid says families are unable to afford a decent quality of life or to spend money on recreation, manifested in their reluctance to buy fruit for the solstice. “Yalda night is a time of the year we sell more, but this time, it seems that there’s no trace of increased sales. The...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: The United States is run by a businessman turned politician who is unwavering in his ignorance about many essentials including respect for multilateralism and concern for the value of human life outside the US borders. It’s difficult to convince Donald Trump to be mindful of the suffering of ordinary Iranian citizens while imposing new sanctions on the Middle East nation or instruct him to read 109 pages of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran nuclear deal) to figure out that long before announcing the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the agreement, he started violating its letter and spirit through his unhelpful public statements about the JCPOA being a badly...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Iranians are unhappy for a number of reasons, like in all countries where people are sometimes more and sometimes less happy. However, the root cause of unhappiness in Iranian society is of a different nature: It’s ideological. There are different ways to measure and illustrate the extent of life satisfaction in different countries. International reports and indices are a good tool to gage why some nations are generally happier while others are less so. Iran is rich with natural resources and invaluable human capital but, at least according to the World Happiness Report 2018, it is a country where people do not smile effortlessly, ranked 106 out of 156 nations. A study by Kuba Krys, a psychologist...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Since the 1979 revolution, women in Iran have been denied entry to sports stadiums. The reasons cited by authorities are mostly religious. In a theocratic state like Iran, they are worried about “ethical values” in society which, they believe, might be undermined if women are allowed to do certain things, such as play athletics or watch football in stadiums alongside men. Now, after almost 40 years of debate and resistance by authorities, religious figures and activists, an important development has taken place: Iranian women were allowed to watch two FIFA World Cup matches featuring the Iranian national team. Thousands of Iranians packed the Azadi Stadium in Tehran, the biggest in the Middle East,...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Association football is not a very successful sport in Iran, but it’s one of the most popular sports in a country with more than half of the population under 35 years old. It’s conventional for schoolchildren to develop an early passion for football and spend the majority of their leisure time playing with their close friends in the yards, gardens or street football pitches. It can be safely argued that football is the basis for many friendships among young people in small cities and rural areas in Iran. The culture of football in Iran and the passion it generates is comparable to what happens in Brazil, even though the achievements of the two countries in this sport is in no way...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: 70 years after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in its current form following the 1948 exodus and what came to be known as Nakba, the international community still appears to be unable to find viable answers for many questions arising from this conflict. Several UN resolutions, Security Council meetings, statements and peace-making committees, fact-finding missions and literally millions of newspaper articles, hundreds of TV documentaries and thousands of hours of negotiations have failed to bring an end to the humanitarian crisis in the offing in Palestine and the political dilemma between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israel is on a quest for recognition, consolidated...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: I chose an early career in journalism by virtue of my journalist family: my parents have been running a local weekly magazine in northern Iran for some 20 years now. Although I can’t say that I regret my choice of becoming a journalist, I should confess this industry has hit a stalemate in my country and those who remain committed to it are almost automatically following the advice embedded in one of the famous poems by Rumi, a 13th century Iranian Sunni poet and jurist who said, “I am not to give away your painful feeling; Or to quit loving you till the day I’m kneeling. Your only souvenir is a whole lot of hurting; Still, I won’t replace it with a certain healing.” Aside from not being well-paid,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Stony Brook Independent: It is difficult to give a vivid picture of Iran’s media and their popularity through figures and statistics. Few studies have been done in this regard, and Iran’s media, including state TV broadcasters and radio stations, newspapers, news agencies and online publications have hardly been successful in surpassing their London or Los Angeles-based competitors in satisfying the varying needs of their audience and their thirst for professional coverage, honesty, fair and accurate reporting and “good news.” It is arguable that Iran’s media have failed the test of legitimacy, as excessive intervention on behalf of the government to manipulate the media content and influence their coverage...

Kourosh Ziabari - Centre for Journalism: What is Nowruz and how does it exactly work? It's a question asked in many different ways and many different responses have been given to it. To sum up, Nowruz (translated verbatim as "new day") is the name of the Iranian New Year and feasts and festivals associated with it. It's celebrated by some 300 million people worldwide, including in Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turkey and by Iranian diaspora in Europe and North America, Australia and elsewhere. Nowruz is the day of the vernal equinox and marks the beginning of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It usually falls on 21st March, which is a special day, because in 1970, the first Earth Day proclamation was...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: There’s a lot going on about Iran in the headlines these days. Saudi Arabia finds it useful to direct timely and untimely ad hominem attacks against Tehran for its interference in the Yemeni affairs; the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations confidently lashes out at Iran in her speeches, talking about the need for the international community to condemn Iran for its destructive regional role, crackdown on human rights activists and pursuit of nuclear and ballistic missile technologies. At home, people, whether those working as government employees or those running small enterprises are complaining about their situation. People of Iran by nature are never easily-satisfied and find the people in power the...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Iran’s role in the Middle East and the region has regularly been questioned and cast into doubt. It’s mostly questioned by the critics of the country’s controversial and ambitious nuclear program and its foreign policy. Iranians will, by and large, gloss over key issues while critics of Tehran specifically cite its foreign policy as a reason to scuttle the nuclear agreement. The current Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, was widely seen as a sensible choice to run the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The truth, however, is that there are few well-trained and educated diplomats with relevant qualifications to run the Ministry. And what progress Zarif does make on the foreign stage his...

Girls walking in front of walls of the former US embassy on Taleghani street, Tehran. Picture by Kamyar Adl / Flickr.com. Kourosh Ziabari - openDemocracy NAWA: Iranians are discussing many important and crucial things these days: things that the government might not be able to find an answer to in the foreseeable future. The Iranian government is not determined enough to implement change, nor does it have the authority and resources to embrace the reforms people are demanding. Meanwhile, in restaurants, coffee shops, streets, schools, newspapers and sometimes even on state TV, people are discussing and talking about reform. People ask valid questions that rarely find viable answers by those who are supposed to find answers: will...