Iran’s people await their share of riches

ghaemshahr, iran -- Hussein Alinejad earns just $217 a month selling fragrant kebabs of chicken and lamb in a steamy shop here, and he knew Iran’s leader couldn’t help but be moved by his plight.

So when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to town in December, Alinejad wrote him a letter explaining his circumstances. He had three children, and a nice piece of land, but no money to build a house. Could he perhaps have a bank loan?

Twenty days later, he got a call from the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee, a charity linked to the government: “Come and get the answer to your letter.” When he arrived, someone handed him an envelope with more than a week’s salary inside, his to keep. And his loan application was under review.

But it’s been eight months since the president came through, and Alinejad still hasn’t heard anything about his loan. A friend got one, but couldn’t afford to buy more than a small garden plot with the money.

Across this city and other areas of relatively prosperous Mazandaran province in northern Iran, one of many rural regions where Ahmadinejad has enjoyed enthusiastic support since his election in 2005, there are growing worries that the trickle-down oil revenue the president promised has trickled only so far. As the Islamic Republic increasingly struggles with deep-rooted economic problems, some here are starting to mutter about broken promises.

Ahmadinejad’s domestic popularity has its roots, in part, in his frequent and well-received jaunts to the provinces, armed with promises of low-interest bank loans and “justice” shares in Iranian companies and plenty of reassuring speeches about Iran’s enduring invincibility.

“Justice means that all talents should be developed. All sections of the country should taste development and enjoy its assets,” he said as he arrived here in Mazandaran, a farm-studded greenbelt of 2.6 million people. “Where there is tyranny, poverty and humiliation, it indicates that some have forgotten God, the messages of prophets and people’s love.”

Even with his loan in limbo, Alinejad is a big fan of the president, whose government has drawn criticism among urbane residents of the capital, Tehran, for mismanaging the economy, cracking down on dissent and getting in fights with the West.

“He is perfect in the way he talks to the people,” he said recently. “He tours the country; he has contact with the real people. I admire that a lot. This city has been ignored by every single president, until him.”

But many others here are tired of giving Ahmadinejad the benefit of the doubt.

“People understand that this country has been through a lot, including eight years of war. There were many martyrs, lots of suffering, all that is true. But now we are in the middle of an oil boom. So what is the share of the people?” said Abbas Tabakkal Shahmirzadi, who writes on the economy and social issues for the local newspaper.

“I didn’t bother to go see him, and I don’t think he’s all that popular, personally,” Faramaz Moghimi, a 56-year-old high school physics teacher, said of the president’s visit. “He’s not convincing people that, OK, I’m serious about rebuilding this town.”

Across the country, the government is doling out oil cash as it grapples with more fundamental economic problems stemming from Iran’s international isolation, large numbers of unemployed graduates and steep inflation fueled in part by the government handouts.

Teachers launched protests over low wages in March and April, resulting in hundreds of arrests.

Factory workers have staged similar protests in recent months over unpaid wages, some going back months.

In June, 57 economists issued an open letter warning that “government mismanagement is inflicting a huge cost on the economy,” with the current high oil prices only “delaying the imminent economic crisis.”

“What you need to understand is that every 1% increase in inflation means that 100,000 Iranian people go under the poverty line,” said Saeed Leylaz, a Tehran-based business consultant. “And the most pressure of inflation is not over people in Tehran, it is over the poor people in the provinces. And they are much, much more under pressure than they were two or three years ago.”

In his free-spending trips to the provinces, Leylaz said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad is trying to exchange the oil income of petrodollars into loyalty, in one sentence. But day by day, this is working less and less.”

Ghaemshahr, a city of half a million people about 100 miles northeast of Tehran, was once one of Iran’s most successful industrial towns. Its five textile mills once employed more than 6,000 people in decent-paying jobs, turning out fabrics, uniforms and industrial storage bags that were sold all over Iran.

The city’s troubles long predate Iran’s current government. Like those in failing textile towns around the world, Ghaemshahr’s aging mills found themselves ill-equipped in a globalized world to compete with cheap labor and materials from farther east in Asia. Worse, eight years of war with Iraq in the 1980s saw much of the city’s workforce deployed to the front; afterward, aging skilled workers were often laid off in favor of unskilled war veterans.

In the early years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the government was reluctant to import spare parts from Europe and the U.S. Instead, it insisted on manufacturing inferior replacements inside Iran and, later, on shutting down functioning equipment to provide spare parts for other machines.

Eventually, many of the remaining machines broke down too.

Now, only three of the original five factories are still open, and they are producing very little, said Aliasghar Moghaddesi, until recently manager of the Goni Bafi Bag Factory in Ghaemshahr.

“These factories need only two things, I can tell you. One, a healthy management, and two, to be updated,” Moghaddesi said. “But politics and industry cannot be compatible, and slogans from politicians cannot do anything.”

Sitting in his villa on the edge of the city, looking out on the blue-misted foothills of the Alborz Mountains and a lush garden of bitter oranges and figs, Moghaddesi nodded in approval as his gardener shot one of a cluster of marauding magpies and impaled its carcass on a pole, as a warning to the others.

His own factory, he said, fell victim to aging equipment, an increasingly unskilled workforce and the fact that the sturdy jute bags the mill produced for farms all over Iran were undercut by cheaper, more versatile jute- reinforced polyester bags from Bangladesh.

He retired and is supporting his wife and grown children on his pension and savings.

“Two of my children are doing military service. Two of them are university graduates, jobless,” he said.

The Ahmadinejad government announced last year that it was building a $1.3-million technical and vocational training center for women in Ghaemshahr, scheduled to open by 2009.

Such initiatives are welcome here, but many also wonder whether there will be jobs for the women once they graduate.

Zahra Alinia, 30, lives with four of her five brothers at her father’s home in Sayyad Kola, a sleepy village of huts and barns surrounded by emerald rice paddies. Neither she nor her brothers can afford to take a job in town: Renting a house would be too expensive, and bus or taxi fare back and forth also would be prohibitively costly.

“I went in for one of these government loans,” Alinia said. “I intended to get a loan to buy a piece of land or a house, so I could be on my own and earn a living, so as at this age not to have to beg for money from my parents,” she said.

“At the beginning, they said I could have 1 million tomans [about $1,080],” she said. “But when I returned to the bank after two months of red tape, they said no, it will be only half a million tomans.

“And at the beginning, Ahmadinejad said these loans were going to be without interest. But actually, it has 3.5% interest. And the first two installments had to be paid back right away. So at the end of the day, I couldn’t do anything with it, actually.”

She laughed bitterly. “I may one day go and buy a bracelet.”

The president, she said, “only provides empty talk -- slogans.”

Her father looked at her sternly. “Ahmadinejad is a good guy,” he interjected. “But his entourage around the administration are not doing his will. They’re not delivering.”

Alinia held her father’s eyes for a long moment. Then he looked away.

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kim.murphy@latimes.com