Posts tagged : "Middle East"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: November 2019 marked one of the gloomiest junctures of the 21st century for Iranians, when in a timespan of less than two weeks, angry protests by large groups of people against the overnight spike in the price of fuel triggered a violent response by the government and some 230 people were killed, according to the official statistics, while a report by Reuters put the number of casualties at 1,500. The protests, which first erupted in oil-rich Khuzestan province and quickly mushroomed across the country, were initially an expression of outrage over the 300% rise in the price of gasoline, in a country gripped by international sanctions and deep-seated economic disparities. However, they soon...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Reports about the delivery of 1.5 million barrels of gasoline to Venezuela by Iran in early June once again threw the saga of relations between those two countries into relief. Media, commentators and scholars have been heatedly debating the enigmatic Iran-Venezuela partnership ever since, and how this alliance can challenge the global dominance of the United States, which has long punished both countries with merciless sanctions. Geographically, there is little that Iran and Venezuela share. They are nearly 12,400 kilometers away from each other. Culturally, contemporary Iran subscribes to a conservative religious tradition, which manifests itself in different aspects of daily life, while Venezuela...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been raging for over seven decades, and the prospects for peace have never seemed more distant than today. The two-state solution, which was once the most widely-accepted remedy for the impasse, has lost traction, and efforts by the United Nations and other intermediaries to resolve the dispute have got nowhere. In 2018, a survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University found that only 43% of Palestinians and Israeli Jews support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. This was down from 52% of Palestinians and 47% of Israeli Jews who favored a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran has been rocked over the past week by the shocking death of a fugitive judge, raising the stakes in a high-profile corruption trial that has put the top echelons of the Islamic Republic under the microscope. The former judge, Gholamreza Mansouri, was found dead on June 19 after falling from a window of the Duke Hotel in Bucharest, Romania, taking with him potentially explosive information in the trial of the influential Akbar Tabari. Tabari, the former deputy head of administrative affairs at Iran’s judiciary, is being indicted along with 21 associates for creating a “criminal group” within his office. Prosecutors allege Tabari obstructed justice and received massive bribes in the form...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: Protests over the continued scarcity of water in the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan have once again thrown into relief the economic and social woes of a region credited with being the beating heart of Iran's petroleum industry. The region routinely provides a boost to the national economy, while it simultaneously stagnates in poverty and underdevelopment. Gheyzanieh province boasts a population of 25,000 and is located 40 kilometres east of Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan Province. It hosts the largest petroleum companies of Iran, and produces 2 million barrels of crude oil per day. The district sits on upwards of 600 oil wells. The majority of Gheyzanieh residents are farmers or have...

Kourosh Ziabari - openDemocracy: Six months after the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 catastrophe, families of the 176 victims and the governments involved, are still waiting for accountability. On the morning of 8 January, the Kiev-bound UIA flight PS752 crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran’s international airport, killing all passengers and crew members on board. Iran’s aviation authorities initially attributed the deadly incident to technical error in the aircraft. However, intelligence agencies of a number of countries sounded the alarm that the jetliner was targeted by missiles most probably fired from a close range and that technical error was out of the question. After three days of denial, the...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: The international community is gripped with the fear of an unprecedented health crisis the like of which has not been seen since the Second World War. The novel coronavirus is wrecking lives in some 190 countries and territories and has thus far caused nearly 309,000 deaths. The economic disruption triggered by the pandemic is believed to be the largest global recession since the Great Depression of 1930s. Extensive cancellation or deferral of sporting, cultural, religious and political events; crisis of legitimacy plaguing political establishments across the world; increased vulnerability of natural ecosystems; debilitating stagnation of international tourism industry; widespread closure of schools and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the death toll from the novel coronavirus in Iran approaches 7,000 and cases surge past 100,000, experts are warning that an untimely reopening in progress could precipitate a new wave of infections. “There is no other path ahead of us,” said President Hassan Rouhani, in explaining to the public his decision to ease a weeks-long nationwide lockdown. Iran remains the Middle East’s epicenter of Covid-19, with more than double the number of recorded infections in Saudi Arabia, the region’s second worst-hit country. The Rouhani administration’s appeal to the International Monetary Fund for a US$5 billion emergency loan to fight the public health crisis has not been responded to...

Kourosh Ziabari - Responsible Statecraft: On April 28, a group of 400 Iranian clerics and seminarians wrote a letter addressed to the Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi, asking him to arrest and indict the Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi and the Secretary of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace Abolhassan Firouzabadi over what they believed was the growth of “vulgarity” in Iran’s cyberspace and the failure of the two officials in completing work on the “national internet.” “National internet” or the National Information Network, as its official name goes, is the product the Iranian hardliners wish to usher in as a domestic replacement for the internet, the information system...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s tourism sector, the pearl of the post-nuclear accord and one of its last economic lungs under sanctions, now faces coronavirus-induced unraveling. The industry “cannot survive and will collapse” in the face of the recession precipitated by the global Covid-19 crisis, Iran’s official IRNA news agency assessed late last month. The stark warning came even as Iranian authorities proceeded with a phased re-opening of certain businesses and places of worship. Should the government of President Hassan Rohani fail to intervene and support the tourism industry, more than 1.5 million jobs risk being lost, IRNA reported. Banafsheh Tehrani is one of some 13,000 Iranian tour guides and tour...

Kourosh Ziabari - Responsible Statecraft: The exodus of Afghan immigrants fleeing Iran in the recent weeks because of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the Islamic Republic has largely gone off the radar of global media, but is actually a tragedy that has the potential of spawning broad, devastating consequences. Iran has been hosting between 3 and 4 million Afghans, of whom only 1 million are registered refugees with legal status and entitlement to government support. Afghans in Iran have faced discrimination on different levels, and unequal access to healthcare services is one of them. For decades, international organizations have been offering financial assistance to Iran to subsidize its support for the Afghan...

Kourosh Ziabari - Responsible Statecraft: Like much of the world, Iran is also engulfed by the deadly outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Thus far, 4,232 people have died and more than 60,000 Iranians have contracted the virus. The country is the epicenter of the disease in the Middle East. Aside from its health impacts, the noxious pandemic has had a clear message for the Iranian leadership: Iran needs viable international partnerships, and to alleviate adversities of this magnitude, it has to disentangle itself from isolation and be part of the international community. Evidently, there are ultra-conservatives and hardliners in Iran, whose vision for the future of Iran is the establishment of an “Islamic North Korea,” bereft...