Khamenei and Social Issues

Ali Motahari, a member of the ninth parliament, states that the leader of the Islamic Republic cried after hearing a report on social pathology in Iran. (Tabnak, November 24, 2015) The office of the Supreme Leader has not reacted to or denied this report, indicating that it reflects reality. What was the content of this report that made Khamenei cry? What aspects did he cry over: poverty and addiction, or the majority of people not adhering to the lifestyle of the clergy, which is mentioned as a social harm in government reports? What does this crying signify? Can political leaders respond to social issues with tears or find solutions for them? Are their tears a sign of sentimentality, weakness, deception, or helplessness? In what other instances has Khamenei cried? The state of social issues in Iran is a significant problem for the Islamic Republic in managing society, as reports on these issues (whether real harms like poverty and addiction or fabricated ones like gambling or improper hijab) are confidentially presented to the leader rather than transparently to the public. The real aspects of these problems are affecting the people, who must respond through various civil, governmental, and public institutions. Therefore, they need to be informed about them. However, they cannot react to these harms because the tools for doing so are not in their hands: neither civil society institutions nor government bodies arise from public demands. Six major social harms in Iranian society include addiction, poverty, urban marginalization, school dropout, divorce, and increased crime rates. Addicts in Iran are estimated to be between 1.5 to 3 million, with about 7 million people consuming drugs. Alcoholics are also estimated to be around 1.3 million. (Director General of Social Affairs, Ministry of Interior, August 22, 2015) Approximately 3,000 people die annually in Iran related to drugs (acute poisoning, overdose, opening packaged drugs inside the bodies of traffickers, injection, and infections like AIDS and hepatitis, and the use of psychotropic substances). (State TV News Agency, August 4, 2015) 15 million people in Iran live below the absolute poverty line, and about two-thirds live below the relative poverty line. According to various reports, between 11 to 18 million people live on the margins of cities (Director General of Social Affairs, Ministry of Interior, August 22, 2015) and are deprived of many urban services. According to the Statistical Center of Iran, out of a population of 19 million and 435 thousand aged 7 to 19, more than 7 million and 100 thousand were unable to continue their education in the 2011-2012 school year due to economic reasons, and in fact, over 37% of Iranian students had to drop out that year. (Bahaar, September 11, 2013) The marriage-to-divorce ratio in Iran has reached about 5 to 1 nationwide and 3 to 1 in large cities. This ratio was about 10.5 to 1 for the country in 2001. Millions of Iranian children and adolescents drop out of school before reaching their high school diploma. Some are married off at a young age, some join the hundreds of thousands of child laborers (officials have accepted a figure of up to 150,000, denying UNICEF's statistics, IRNA, September 8, 2015), and some join addicted and delinquent street children. In 2014, about 1.7 million people were arrested in Iran (ISNA, August 15, 2015), and this figure has been increasing every year. The top 10 crimes in the first three months of 2015 saw a 15% increase compared to the same period in 2014. (ILNA, September 19, 2015) These harms are interconnected. For example, 55% of divorces are related to addiction. Two-thirds of the prison population and two-thirds of executions are for drug-related crimes. Marginalized individuals live in conditions of absolute or relative poverty. These are likely the topics presented to Khamenei in a unified report, but they can also be found scattered in the media. Citizens' reactions to these realities are sighs, regrets, and concerns, but officials do not have the public resources and power to express their feelings and are not supposed to deliver regrets and sorrow to the people. Khamenei's public silence on social harms is notable. He has spoken extensively on foreign policy, domestic politics, culture, and art, but has not addressed social harms, neither about the problems nor about solutions. He has commented on the homeless in the United States, falsely stating their numbers are in the millions (October 6, 2010), but has remained silent on homelessness and other social issues in Iran. Therefore, his loyalists can only register his crying as a reaction. No journalist can sit before him and ask what his solution is for widespread poverty, the addiction of millions, the lives of millions in shanties, increasing divorce rates, rising crime, and the millions of students dropping out of school. He always guides his managers and loyalists from above and is not accountable to anyone. Since neither the report on social harms nor Khamenei's reaction has been detailed to the public, we do not know which part of the report made him cry: the trend of people's indifference to Sharia (which officials consider social harms in Iran) or the deaths of thousands due to drug use. Khamenei's tears typically fall into two categories: during mourning ceremonies for Shia Imams and when threatening to suppress opponents, the former to consolidate power among faithful Shia followers and the latter to incite loyalists to follow his orders and portray himself as a victim. It is unclear whether crying over social harms fits into these two categories. This crying, in addition to expressing helplessness, may also serve to comfort his supporters. Khamenei's tears over social harms are primarily a response to the demands of the regime's supporters (the victims, in his view, are of no importance) regarding the resolution or alleviation of social problems: whether real issues like urban marginalization or fictitious ones like hijab or gambling. The media equates the use of crystal meth in the subway with two girls gambling in public, and both problems are expected to be resolved with tears. The regime's supporters must be convinced by Khamenei's crying that the 'system' cares, but cannot do anything, and this should be sufficient for them. Furthermore, it fuels the cultural aspect of the infiltration project to justify more repression to prevent cultural infiltration. Ali Motahari has raised this issue with the same approach. Instead of addressing social harms through policymaking and resource allocation, Khamenei attempts to gloss over the issue with a few tears. He can do nothing else. Over the past four years, Khamenei has spent approximately $4 to $7 billion annually in Syria to support the killing of Syrian people and Bashar al-Assad (Bloomberg, June 9, 2015). He also provides hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. The cost of corruption to the national budget is about $34 billion per year. (Ahmad Tavakoli, April 15, 2015) Resource waste is another source of budget misallocation for economic and social development. A country facing a financial crisis under sanctions, with its revenues spent or wasted elsewhere, cannot naturally pay attention to its social problems because social budgets are usually the first to be cut in such conditions.