Children of Iran, December 2017. Wikicommons/ Mostafameraji. Some rights reserved.On Tuesday
night, I was on the plane coming back from giving a talk, when Donald Trump
announced his rejection of the Iran nuclear deal.
The subject
of the talk, ironically, was the economic sanctions and the ordinary
suffering of Iranians. With a few exceptions, which sadly did not lead to more
persistent and lasting attention, mainstream and
western media accounts of economic sanctions have presented the nuclear dispute
with Iran in a narrow and exclusionary framework which has focused on questions
of the level of uranium enrichment, and the constant question mark posed over
Iran’s compliance.
Meanwhile whilst the technicalities are hotly
debated, the pain and predicament of the bodies of ordinary Iranians bearing
the weight of sanctions seems to have been either ignored and side-lined, or even
worse, deemed as the necessity which facilitates optimal
success.
Life under sanctions
During the last four years doing research on the
politics of Iran’s social media as they related to life under the US-led sanctions,
I often came across highly emotionally charged accounts where people would attempt
to describe their lives as a way of documenting and lending legitimacy to their
frustrations, despair and anger directed towards the imposers of the sanctions
– not only those so often referred to in Iran as ‘the westerners’, but
also the mostly conservative elements within the Iranian governing regime who
wanted to pursue the nuclear program.
The following is a Facebook comment posted in
February 2015, a few months before the deal was struck. It is in the form of an
informal letter addressed to Javad Zarif, as though the writer is drawing on a
personal relationship in order to highlight a matter of great urgency:
‘In what language do I need to say you that we
don’t want nuclear energy? At what expense do we have nuclear power? At the
expense of a sick child in his dad’s arms, dying because of not having enough
money for drugs? At the expense of poverty and prostitution among the youth? At
the expense of children sleeping with empty stomachs? At the expense of fathers
losing their jobs? Really, at what expense? If we open our eyes [we see]
economic sanctions have affected us, in fact affected us immensely. Really,
people don’t deserve to live like this. […] You please do whatever you can with
your own hands to lift the sanctions quickly. The eyes of Iran and its children
are on you.’
The spectators
of suffering[1]
I’ll
be situating this in relation to what Iranians commonly feel to be a western lack
of recognition of their suffering lives, what they refer to as their
‘despairing’ life and ‘broken backs’, a Farsi expression invoking the misery of
existence. So, it was not a total surprise when I found myself agitated for the
entire duration of the flight, for we had taken off just before the US
president announced his decision on the fate of the nuclear deal.
We
had barely landed when, with a mixture of joy and distress, I heard the
captain’s voice announcing that comforting phrase: ‘you may wish now to switch
your phones on’. I checked my Telegram and Twitter for all the bad news updates
even before I grabbed my hand luggage. I learned not only that the US would be abandoning the
long-sought agreement, but that it would also ensure the reimposition of the
sanctions on Iran which had been lifted or postponed.
And
I was only one of millions sharing their distress: the Iranian social media
platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Telegram – the two latter amongst
the most popular Farsi online platforms – were already accumulating the
intensity of what everyone was feeling and thinking about the possible consequences
of Trump’s speech.
On my
Telegram platform, people had already started constructing and mediating satire
and jokes, and also capturing feelings of vulnerability, frustration, fear and
anger. Telegram is amongst the most popular social media applications for the
ordinary Iranian public, yet the most
controversial and provocative one under the ruling class’s eagle eyes (it doesn’t take much time
to figure out there isn’t a happy marriage between the Iranian public and the
conservative governing regimes).
One
of my regular reads is an ex-blogger who had left off blogging – ‘weblogistan’
is now a graveyard of dead sites – to try her luck on Telegram. She has been
writing about everyday life and has over three thousand subscribers. That night
she wrote how it seemed that Iran was engaged in early preparations for another
New Year – everyone super alert, sitting and waiting excitedly to hear the
fireworks. Her daughters, already in bed, were waiting for Trump’s decision;
the youngest one, poking her head out from under the duvet, sleepily asked: ‘is
he in or out?’.
Far
away from her, I was barely able to sit on my seat during the flight, desperate
to hear whether Trump was ripping up so many hearts and hopes. It is true that
since 2015, and the sheer euphoria over the final nuclear deal between Iran and
the ‘5+1’ global powers, ordinary people’s lives have not gone back to ‘normal’.
Nevertheless, the hope persists in the public, the hope for an eventual sanctions-free
future.
The prospect
of a nuclear deal had been the subject of everyday household talk in Iran –
something we would talk about over dinner, or at parties, weddings and funeral
gatherings. After 2010’s Comprehensive Sanctions Act (CISADA), when sanctions
began to seriously bite into ordinary lives, the prospect of an agreement seemed
unbelievable, or at least not on the cards any time soon. When Barack Obama
announced the deal, taking pride and joy in what he called at the time ‘our best bet’, it was not only
perceived as a victory for the then US president and his European counterparts;
it was caressed by ordinary Iranians as the hope they longed for.
‘Broken backs’
Since the 1979 revolution, which resulted in the establishment of
the Islamic Republic, Iran has been under various types of sanctions, but the
intensified sanctions on Iran effectively began in 2006 and reached their
climax in 2010. In response to
allegations concerning Iran’s attempts to develop a nuclear weapons capacity,
the UN Security Council imposed additional sanctions, which were binding upon
all member states. Meanwhile, the US
continued unilaterally expanding its punitive measures. The US also threatened
punitive measures against any countries trading with Iran – an act which was
criticized even by US allies as extra-territorial interference. Joy Gordon points out that the set of
sanctions called (CISADA) or the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability,
and Divestment Act were the
severest measures against Iran, with strong similarities to the disastrous
sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s. As Erica Moret, a senior
researcher at the Institute of International and Development Studies and chair
of the Geneva International Sanctions Network explains, economic sanctions went well
beyond the authorized sanctions by the UN Security Council resolutions, and have had
broad, indiscriminate effects on economic and social life in Iran, in particular
on the availability of medicine and cost of imported goods. They also affected Iran’s energy sector, and
not only the cost but the safety of transportation: plane crashes were
frequent, given that Iran wasn’t allowed to obtain spare parts for its aircraft.
In or out?
As I
write this, I give myself a break to chat on Facebook with a long-time friend
of mine in Iran. The conversation starts with him saying ‘hey, every minute I
feel more and more disgusted by what is happening. The worst thing is to take away
the hope from people, and this is something which, by an amazing stroke of
luck, both “the inside” and “the outside” are generous enough to do for us’.
I
felt his bitter sarcasm in my heart. He did not even need to explain what he
meant by the terms ‘inside’ and ‘outside’: we both knew them from all the
discussions that had publicly emerged on social media, first on Facebook and latterly,
when the star of Facebook began to fade, on Twitter and Telegram.
Last
night, I spent hours navigating what was being said. These terms had yet again
returned, surfacing in online discussions around the unlikely proximity of
hardliners and conservatives in Iran to hardliners in the United States, given
that all of them had been hostile to the deal from the moment it was signed.
The success
of Dr Hassan Rouhani’s presidential campaign in 2013 in mobilising people was
precisely due to his invocation of a hope that the economic sanctions would
come to an end, and with that the promise that a better life will emerge;
Hassan Rouhani was able to generate this hope by granting the Iranian public an
acknowledgement and recognition of their pain and suffering, long denied both
by western countries, but also by Iranian
conservatives. Let’s remember Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s famous statement that the
sanctions did not have any effect on ordinary people: they were ‘a torn piece of
paper’!
Risks?
So I
write now to highlight the importance of bringing the vulnerability of bodies
in pain and the precariousness of lives – children suffering shortages of
medicine, people with chronic disease, the bitterness of people not being able
to provide for their families – back into a political sphere currently alive
with discussions on Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions.
Yet
again, in that part of the political sphere which gets the spotlight – especially
in the European Union countries – attention is wholly occupied with analyses,
ideas, and hypotheses about the future of trade with Iran, and the ‘risks’ – to
people or business? – of reducing engagement. This is why I am a social media
enthusiast – for its role in bringing to the surface those fragments of
everyday lives which do not always cohere outside it, for bitterly angry people
who do not watch what they say, who do not mind at all that what they say does
not count within the so called ‘real’ political sphere, with its traditional or
‘legacy’ media.
Believe
me, compared with the scale of destruction and interruption of ordinary life
wrought by the economic sanctions over the years, I now consider as banal my
occasional – though traumatising – arrests by the infamous morality police in
Tehran for not wearing my scarf ‘properly’. This, if you like, was part of an
everyday mundane practice of resistance and not that disruptive – at least then
I could hold onto a job, in between getting notices to attend the police
station.
[1] The phrase is borrowed from
the title of the book The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006) by Lilie
Chouliaraki.
