New Minister Questions Raisi’s Pledge To Build One Million Housing Units
Iran’s New Urban Development Minister says the government does not have money to build one million housing units per year as promised by President Ebrahim Raisi.
Iran’s New Urban Development Minister says the government does not have money to build one million housing units per year as promised by President Ebrahim Raisi.
Mehrdad Bazrpash, who was approved by the Iranian parliament as Minister of Road and Urban Development on Wednesday, said building four million housing units in four years with cost $80 billion at $20,000 per unit.
Raisi promised to build one million apartments per year during his presidential campaign in 2021, without much consideration to the cost involved.
Asking parliamentarians how this large amount of money can be resourced, he said it is almost twice the amount of the country’s budget this year.
He also mentioned that around 240 thousand previously built government housing units remain unfinished, and the parliament should think of a resource to complete them.
Driven by former President MahmoudAhmadinejad’s populist vision, a project called Mehr was launched more than decade ago seeking to enable homeownership for the economically “oppressed”. The project proved to be a failure do to bad planning and mismanagement.
The scheme caused prices to soar, enabled corruption and profiteering, and made affordable housing out of reach not only for the poor, but also for the relatively well-off.
Reports say the ministry has not built even one housing unit so far, after Raisi and ex-minister Rostam Ghasemi took office.
From the beginning when the proposal was made, many experts did not take it seriously, arguing that Iran would need nearly $15 billion a year to construct one million units, money it simply does not have amid economic crisis and sanctions.
Last week, Black Reward, a hactivist group released tens of files containing IRGC-linked Fars News Agency's exclusive security briefings for the Guard’s Commander Hossein Salami, compromising some closely held secrets.
One immediate victim was Abbas Darvish-Tavangar, a long-time hardliner media man and analysts who was the second in command at Fars.
One of the outlets that published the files for the public, the online Iranian Studies Library, noted that the security briefing bulletins were prepared exclusively for Salami by a team headed by Tavangar. Individual bulletins were prepared in between 120 to 140 pages daily.
As pointed out by an insider commentator Abbas Abdi, the agency came up with conflicting explanations including denying the existence of the bulletins. "They said the briefings as published contained lies, rumors and inaccurate information. Later they said Salami did not need such information and that they have been prepared by a single rogue element. Some others called the bulletins 'dirty political weapons,' and levelled all sorts of accusations against the bulletins' authors. All that made the matter even more complicated."
Abdi asked a series of important questions. If the content of the bulletins were wrong or if Salami did not need them, why their compilation and publication continued. Does this mean that the news dissemination system is faulty even at such a high level? Also, no matter if the content was true or false, was Salami influenced by the information? The intended audience may have been badly misled by this and other similar bulletins. Have they been the basis of decision making by the intended audience?
If the information was false, did someone deliberately misinform the IRGC commander or the producer of the bulletins simply lacked the editorial judgement and skill for collecting the information? In both cases, using such briefings could have been dangerous, Abdi pointed out.
Referring to the "top secret" classification of the bulletins, Abdi noted that they might have included right, wrong, and unverified information. This does not mean that everything in the bulletins were top secret. But the IRGC assigned the classification to prevent others from finding out its sensitivities and priorities.
Meanwhile Abdi added that the hacking prompted the IRGC to deny the bulletins' contents. He concluded that an organization that is surprised by revelations about its behind-the-scenes operations certainly has a problematic structure.
In another development, conservative commentator Mohammad Mohajeri warned that state officials should treat all such briefing bulletins in a way as if their contents are not true unless it is proven otherwise. He pointed out that false information may be deliberately put at officials' disposal to mislead them.
Mohajeri also pointed out that some of the contents of the hacked bulletins are half-truths and half lies, and this is even worse than giving false news to someone. However, considering Mohajeri's background as one of the former editors of the ultraconservative Kayhan newspaper, and his links to the core of the regime, his comments may be an effort at damage control.
On the other hand, Mohajeri called for an end to the publication of similar bulletins, calling them "biased," although he also opined that the briefings could be helpful if they were authored in a professional way. He said bulletins were being prepared and disseminated to officials for at least thirty years now, and some of them are utterly created to channel their audience's behavior and decisions in a certain direction.
Iranians are well acquainted with the concept of political graffiti and used it extensively during the days that led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, but these days they are using the medium to overthrow the Islamic regime.
According to documents released by hacktivist group Black Reward last week, the authorities are gravely concerned about the propagation of the phenomenon on the backdrop of nationwide protests and strikes that have rocked the foundations of the clerical regime during the past 80 days.
The confidential briefing papers to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and ranking members of the Revolutionary Guard, acquired by hacking into the database of IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency, revealed that the authorities seem unable to deal with the enormous number of political slogans on walls and the persistence of protesters to renew them after they are painted over by the cities’ sanitation departments or volunteer members of Basij paramilitary force. In one of the documents, the city of Zanjan was mentioned as an example where almost all its walls are covered with slogans against the regime. Something especially worrying for the regime is the slogans directly targeting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, referring to him as a “bloodthirsty dictator” or a “despot” whose days are numbered.
Iranians know the significance of slogans against Khamenei, whose zealot supporters are prepared to kill anyone for even criticizing him, let alone wishing death for him. But now, according to the leaked documents, even schoolchildren are using slurs to talk about him. Profanities against the Supreme Leader which were only chanted in the worst protest-riot situations in the past have become mainstream, while protesters are continuously coming up with new and ingeniously rhyming slogans with even stronger profanities. This degree of profanity is unprecedented in Iran where four-letter words are normally avoided in most social and even private contexts, particularly in the presence of women and children.
The regime’s agents are busy everywhere painting over the slogans or doodling over them to conceal the zeitgeist of society, but people are greater in numbers and bolder in action. For every graffiti that is painted over, more or bigger graffiti appear the following day. The most frequently used slogan is the motto of the uprising: Women, life, liberty – words that describe people’s aspiration that no amount of paint can hide them.
Walls have become a new frame for people to make their voices heard. As American linguist George Lakoff explains in his book Don't Think of an Elephant!, that when you frame the debate, you have already won. Its rough translation on street walls of Iran is that however the regime paints over its walls, it cannot change the fact that most Iranians do not want the regime.
According to an article in Etemad newspaper, the calls on Tehran’s municipality's service requesting to remove writings from walls have recently increased 60-fold. The paper cited sociologist Hossein Imani Jajarmi as saying that such an increase “is directly tied to the recent unrest.” Describing political graffiti as a common tool to express economic and political woes as well as racial and gender discrimination, he said the spread of graffiti during the past few months can be a sign of ineffectiveness of the regime’s coercive and military measures.
Over 1,500 instances of political graffiti were found at Pompeii, offering a glimpse into the workings of Roman politics at the local level. Similar to how graffiti shed light on how politics was in the city of Pompeii until it was buried under volcanic ash and pumice in 79 AD, the walls of Iranian cities testify as to how the people fought their way to “Women, life, liberty.”
