Rooyesh

Activists urging U.S. pension funds to divest in Iran-linked companies are hoping the Sept. 11 anniversary will draw attention to a cause they say is gaining momentum in state legislatures across the country. “This is something we can do without spilling a drop of blood or firing a bullet to bring about a better outcome in the Middle East,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother was a pilot on the hijacked jet that crashed into the Pentagon near Washington.

Burlingame spent the days before Tuesday’s sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks promoting Divest Terror, a group linked to conservative think-tank the Center for Security Policy, which is lobbying multi-billion-dollar public pension funds to use their economic clout against countries they see as America’s enemies.

Missouri and Louisiana have taken steps on Iran and California is among about a dozen states with action pending.

“There are many more states that I will have legislation in come January 1,” said Divest Terror director Chris Holton.

U.S. companies already are banned from doing business in Iran, which is on a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, along with Sudan, Syria, North Korea and Cuba.

Activists want investors to target European firms such as Italy’s Eni and Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell Plc, all drawn to the huge Iranian energy resources that are crucial to the Islamic state’s economy. Telecoms firms and banks also are among those under scrutiny.

Washington is pressing Tehran because of suspicions it is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, although Iran says its nuclear program is purely peaceful. The United States also accuses Iran of backing terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Burlingame said the two issues were linked since al Qaeda wants weapons of mass destruction and “Iran seems like a fertile place to go looking.” She said the Sept. 11 anniversary was a way of getting people’s attention.

“They think more about terrorism on that particular day,” Burlingame said.

NUCLEAR THREAT

Peter Zimmerman, a retired professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, said it was misleading to combine the ideas of nuclear weapons and terrorism.

“None of the 9/11 crew, as I remember, were Iranians, and most of them were from Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It’s worth reminding people that al Qaeda is a strictly Sunni organization and Iran is a very strictly Shi’ite state and it’s not clear to me that Iran would in fact give a weapon to al Qaeda.

“My interest in Iran is in its nuclear weapons program,” he said. “It’s the difference between killing by the thousands, killing by tens and killing by millions.”

Israeli politicians and some pro-Israel groups in America are among those who have urged pension funds to divest in Iran, whose president has threatened to wipe Israel off the map.

But Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said growing support for divestment was fueled by local initiatives rather than lobbying by his or other similar organizations.

“People are seeing that the reality (of Iran getting nuclear weapons) is coming closer,” he said.

The U.N. Security Council has adopted two sanctions resolutions against Tehran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. Western powers are weighing a third resolution.

In July, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to give legal protections to investment managers who pull money out of Iran. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a Democratic presidential candidate, has introduced a similar bill in the Senate.

Washington has not ruled out military action.

Holton said public pension funds had many billions of dollars at their disposal. “We have a tremendous amount of economic leverage we can use against Iran before we unleash hell on them,” he said.

U.S. pressure already has led several German banks to scale back in Iran and Holton said Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS AG, had been removed from Divest Terror’s “dirty dozen” list since it said last year it would cut all ties to Iran.

Holton said the main argument against divestment was that it would hurt portfolio performance but he rejected that.

“The asset managers on Wall Street are in between a rock and a hard place because of a lot of them were there when the towers came down and had to run for their lives,” Holton said.

“They understand the threat of terrorism, they also know from the days of the South Africa divestment movement of the 1980s that this is possible, it can be done.”

Source: Reuters

An Iranian-American academic detained in Iran will be freed soon on bail, the judge in charge of his case said on Tuesday. Kian Tajbakhsh was detained in May on security-related charges in May while visiting the country. “Bail of about 100,000 dollars has been set and he will be released soon,” judge Hassan Haddad told Iran’s student news agency ISNA, without giving further details.

A U.S.-Iranian academic also detained in May on the same charges, Haleh Esfandiari, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, was released on bail in August. She returned to the United States in early September. Tajbakhsh, a consultant with the Soros Institute, earlier told reporters visiting Tehran’s Evin prison that he expected to be released shortly. He said he had been held in solitary confinement for about 120 days. “I expect to be freed soon … My conditions inside the prison are fine,” Tajbakhsh told reporters taken on a visit to the prison, where many political activists and pro-reform students are held. The visit was organized by the judiciary. Both he and Esfandiari had been charged with acting against national security and spying. Judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi also said he would likely be released soon, “probably within the next few days.”

Iran’s state television aired a program in July called “In the Name of Democracy,” which Iran’s Foreign Ministry said had revealed a U.S.-backed plot to overthrow Iran’s clerical establishment. The United States denounced the program as “illegitimate and coerced,” urging Tehran to release the detainees. Despite being freed on bail, the case against Esfandiari remains open although it is not clear if she will face trial. It is not clear whether Tajbakhsh could also still be tried if he is released. Another U.S.-Iranian Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, is also being held at Evin Prison while a fourth was previously released on bail and her passport returned.

Source: Reuters

Nicaragua, the Central American nation noted for its connection to Iran during a political scandal two decades ago, is coming under fresh scrutiny for its ties to Tehran. Back in the ’80s, Oliver North and members of the Reagan Administration found themselves embroiled in controversy for selling arms to Iran and illegally funneling the profits to the anti-Communist rebels known as the contras, who were fighting the regime of Daniel Ortega.

Now Ortega is once again President of Nicaragua — and apparently forging new ties with Tehran. The Nicaragua-Iran embrace includes four significant events since Ortega took office as the democratically elected leader of his country last January. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, to personally congratulate Ortega days after his Jan. 10 inauguration. Then Ortega borrowed a jet from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to visit Iran in June. Two months later, Iran and Venezuela pledged $350 million to build a seaport near Monkey Point on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. (Tehran has also been cultivating an alliance with oil-rich Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.) And last Wednesday, the Nicaraguan foreign minister returned from Tehran, where he met with the foreign ministers of Syria, Cuba and Iran. There is now speculation that Nicaragua may support Tehran’s bid for a seat in the U.N. Security council. The State Department has been cryptic in its assessment of Iran’s role in Nicaragua. “Iran’s track record does not suggest it wishes to play a constructive role in the hemisphere,” David Foley, a State Department spokesman on Middle East issues, said in an e-mail, then added in a telephone interview, “We’re not adjusting our policy in Nicaragua depending on what Ahmadinejad is up to.” The Bush Administration has not focused on Nicaragua much at all, despite the election of the leftist Ortega.

Foley says merely that Washington “has a positive agenda in the hemisphere and we are working with our partners to strengthen democracy, promote prosperity and invest in people.” “Nicaragua is a place you can basically ignore as long as it is not doing anything significantly negative,” says Dennis Jett, Dean of the International Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville. However, Jett and other analysts wonder whether Tehran’s romancing of Managua may mark a change in that status. “You have to wonder what the Iranians are thinking as Mr. Bush goes through his bluster and threatens military action against Iran,” says Jett. “It wouldn’t surprise me that if they found a willing partner in Nicaragua that they would put some terrorist capability into Nicaragua and Venezuela, because it’s that much closer to the United States if they have to use it.” Jett says, however, that if Ortega envisions making his country a launch pad for the Iranians, much the way Cuba was for the Soviets in 1962, he could be courting trouble. “I don’t know that Nicaraguans would see it in their best interest to do that, because then they would become targets — in a real way.” Indeed, Jett says, “It would not only upset the United States but all the neighboring countries in Central America.”

Already, Iran’s presence in Nicaragua has upset neighboring Honduras, where two newspapers recently reported the arrival of Iranian diplomats who entered Honduras from Nicaragua bent on photographing hotels, businesses, embassies and tourist sites. Nevertheless, an alliance between Iran and Nicaragua could pose practical security problems for the U.S. “[Terrorist activities] could be much harder to detect than the Cuban Missile Crisis,” says Jett. who notes that in the 1960s satellite photos detected the danger, but today a nuclear bomb can be hidden in a suitcase and go undetected. Neither Managua or Tehran has much to gain by an Iranian military presence, says Jett. “I would think they would just keep it covert and low key to the extent that they had one.” The real question for the moment is what Iran and Venezuela expect to get in return for their investment in Nicaragua.

Next November, delegations from both countries plans to meet in Managua to discuss the seaport. “Nicaragua must give a ‘quid pro quo’ … because the other two partners have not talked about [the seaport development being a] gift,” says Roger Guevara, a Managua-based lawyer and former Nicaraguan ambassador to Venezuela, in an e-mail to TIME. “Certainly the Nicaraguan Government has to study what… they can offer,” he says. “This includes a possibility of more than political and diplomatic support in the international forums.” A source familiar with the situation suggests that Iran may be positioning itself for a seat on the United Nations Security Council when the selection process take place next month. If elected, Iran would serve a two-year stint as a temporary member from the Asia region. To date, only Vietnam of the countries in that region has formally announced its candidacy for the post. Whether Nicaragua would support Iran in a bid for the Security Council remains unknown. Attempts to interview the ambassador proved unsuccessful.

Source: Time

Disillusioned with government management, skilled professionals and graduates are leaving Iran in droves, adding to its economic woes. She drove a black jeep, lived in the exclusive Farmanieh district in North Tehran and held promiscuous, cocaine-fuelled parties for her wealthy friends on the

outskirts of the Iranian capital. Everything changed one night, when Nazanine Aghazadeh was caught by the religious police and sentenced to whipping. Aghazadeh described the government office where she went to receive her punishment as “full of people that are not my type, lower-city people of the type that have had a daughter caught with six boys in one room”. The experience was so traumatic for Aghazadeh her parents sent her to Dubai. Three months after arriving, Aghazadeh had moved in with her aunt, secured a job through family connections with a real estate agent and, in an email, pronounced herself “satisfied”. “I like my new life,” she said. “It is very drab and I wake every day at 6.45am and go to bed at 10pm, but I feel more satisfied with this kind of living.” Aghazadeh is one of the wealthier representatives of the steady stream of Iranians abandoning their country for a brighter educational or professional future overseas. The International Monetary Fund says more than 150,000 of Iran’s best minds leave Iran every year and the election of the hardline and socialist-leaning President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has spurred the flow. In 2005 the fund said Iran had the highest rate of brain drain in a poll of 90 countries. Since Ahmadinejad’s election, the state’s share of the economy has swollen and the Tehran stock exchange has dropped more than a quarter in value. Unemployment is officially at 11.5 per cent but the real figure could be as high as 20 per cent. The unofficial sanctions regime that the United States has imposed on Tehran is gradually bearing fruit as inflation climbs and direct foreign investment plummets. Many of the thousands of well-educated Iranian expatriates who flocked back to Iran in the late ’90s, drawn by the reformist government of former president Mohammad Khatami and an improving economy, are leaving again. Their disillusionment was summed up in a 2005 report issued by the Iranian Studies Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Some of the factors prompting the return to the West included “an inefficient system and government that is not willing to help and in many instances creates more obstacles, and a strong resistance to change within different institutions, from private firms to academic departments”. The report also cited “a low level of respect given to quality work, lack of honesty and transparency, immigration of trained workers and a general attitude of disillusionment among the population”. Despite Ahmadinejad’s promises to fight corruption, he has failed to uproot patronage networks festering within the opaque financial structures of the Islamic republic. “That’s where the real money and the source of the Islamic republic’s power is,” an Iranian analyst affiliated with the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tehran says. Another factor in the brain drain is the powerful and entrenched aghazadeh network dominated by sons of prominent clerics. In the upmarket neighbourhoods of North Tehran, the preserve of the pro-Shah class before the revolution, a new aristocracy has moved in. Today, teams of Afghan immigrant construction workers and the sound of drilling fill the streets, the symptoms of an oil-fuelled construction boom.

Iranian economists who spoke to Jane’s Intelligence Weekly noted that senior officials of the regime, concerned about their funds being frozen in European banks, were repatriating their fortunes and investing the money in real estate. The aghazadehs are a class minted by the Islamic republic. A financial criminal named Shahram Jazayeri-Arab is typical. The son of a cleric, the multimillionaire Jazayeri-Arab held a fortune estimated at $US219 million. It was largely accrued because of his social position as an aghazadeh, one of the elite of well-connected and trusted regime insiders allowed access to the highest levels of the Islamic republic. Jazayeri-Arab was arrested in 2001 on charges related to economic corruption, illegal exports, bribery, forgery and massive embezzlement of state funds and assets. A court sentenced him to 27 years’ jail. During his trial, it emerged that he had paid large sums to the former reformist-held parliament to influence its decisions. This further discredited the state and, bizarrely, elevated Jazayeri-Arab into a popular idol. The worsening economic situation prompted 57 Iranian economists to attack the Government’s policies in June. They charged that mismanagement was jlinflicting a huge cost on the economy, the brunt of which is borne by the working class, Ahmadinejad’s claimed core constituency.

Pointing at what they called an unprecedented injection of liquidity into the economy - $US54 billion of oil money this year - they said the Government had raised inflation and invested in economically unsound public works. Konchi is a village in the southern province of Hormozgan where the effects of Ahmadinejad’s policies, or of any other government, have hardly been felt. Huddling in a sparsely populated mountainous area almost 100 kilometres inland, it is one of the most isolated places in Iran. It was connected to the electricity grid only in 1994. Denuded of its young and middle-aged male population, Konchi is one of several deserted villages bearing testimony to the brain drain. Before the city-state of Dubai, a short boat ride across the Persian Gulf, closed its gates to illegal immigrants, the residents of this region used to steal across the waterway to the wealthy United Arab Emirates in search of work. Hormozganis were some of the first manual labourers to move to Dubai and they repatriated their wages to Iran before getting their families to join them in the Arab peninsula. Today, brick homes surrounded by lush vegetation strike a contrast in the arid, poverty-stricken landscape and give away those locals who made money abroad. But for the new generation, unemployment is higher than ever. “The shurta [police] caught us before we even set foot in Dubai,” says Amir, 30 and unemployed. “Now they’ve really clamped down and it’s impossible to get there.” Despite being a petroleum superpower exporting more than 4 million barrels of oil a day and having an annual growth rate of 6 per cent, Iran cannot translate its economic achievements into job opportunities.

With up to 50 million Iranians under the age of 30, it is little surprise an estimated 150,000 highly skilled graduates are joining the 3 million Iranians who live overseas. “Yes, the young people go abroad, but they come back,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a speech last year. Back in Dubai, Aghazadeh drives a late-model Peugeot and goes to the British University. She hopes Dubai will be an intermediate stop on her way to London and a glittering future. For now, she is enjoying walking in public with her hair uncovered and being able to swim at mixed-sex pools. The reporter’s byline has been withheld for fear of official retaliation.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald