Opinion

Iran’s noteworthy graffiti

May 01, 2018

IRANIANS opposed to the incompetent rule of the ayatollahs have come up with the ruse of “Talking banknotes” by which they scrawl anti-regime messages on currency. It is not yet clear how widespread is the action but it comes as a protest against Tehran’s clampdown on the highly popular social media platform Telegram.

The messages include “I am an overthrower” the slogan from last December’s far-flung protests against economic hardship and “Our enemy is right here. They say it is America”.

It is reported that some 40 million Iranians were using this social medium until the regime banned it. However, as with all such prohibitions, technology-savvy members can circumvent the block by using proxy servers. Thus, even though the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has shut down his own Telegram presence, on the grounds that it would “safeguard the national interest”, it seems that the use of the platform is far from over.

Defacing banknotes is of course a criminal offense in most countries and understandably so. The campaign is also likely to be of limited effect. The ayatollahs have only to rule that any bills nearing a slogan are no longer legal tender for people to start refusing to accept them.

Nevertheless, the “talking banknote” campaign has another impact, in that it focuses popular attention of the collapsing international value of the Iranian rial. The currency was hit badly after the 1979 revolution as supporters of the Shah rushed to get themselves and their wealth out of the country. But the decline has continued under the economically illiterate ayatollahs. When Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power, Iranians could buy a US dollar for 70 rials. By this month the rate had collapsed to 60,000 rials. Only the favored few around the regime, with access to its foreign currency earnings from oil have survived while steady inflation has destroyed the savings of ordinary Iranians and imposed ever-greater hardship as the prices, even of staples like bread and cooking gas, have risen steadily.

It is the utter failure of the Tehran regime to run an efficient economy that has so undermined its once widespread support. Particular victims are the bazaari merchants who were originally such enthusiastic supporters of the ayatollahs. Almost 40 years after its violent change of regime, Iran is in a complete economic mess. And what is so telling is that these problems persist despite Barack Obama’s US-led nuclear deal which lifted international sanctions. That economic stranglehold had brought the regime to the edge of collapse. It forced Tehran to the negotiating table and the world was led to believe that Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry was going to draw the regime’s nuclear teeth, once and for all.

In the end, Kerry and his fellow members of the P5+1 negotiators, the five permanent Security Council members, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and United States, together with the European Union, were driven to distraction by some masterful Iranian negotiators led by Mohammed Javad Zarif. The deal that was finally inked in 2015 was very far from the denuclearization the international community expected. That agreement most crucially also lifted sanctions. Yet for all that, the ayatollahs have failed to restore Iran’s economic fortunes. Could this mean that President Trump’s expected disavowal of Obama’s foolish deal is likely to bring Tehran to its senses, and sooner rather than later?


May 01, 2018
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