Unions, Rights Groups Voice Support For Iran’s Strikes

Meanwhile, the reopening of Opal shopping mall, a major shopping center in northern Tehran has angered some supporters of the regime.

IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency reported on Sunday that at least 13 cafes and restaurants in Tehran were sealed in connection with removing of mandatory hijab by customers or staff.

In another development, Iranian media reported that some stores in Opal shopping mall have been sealed again after reopening on Sunday.

The shops had offered discounts to clients who come in person without veils.

However, the owners denied publishing the offers on social media and apologized.

Iranian regime has closed at least 2,000 businesses since late March for women’s refusal to wear compulsory hijab, with tens of thousands of employees losing their jobs.

Hardliner media reported April 25 that some businesses, mainly restaurants and cafes, owned by celebrity artists and popular footballers have been shut down or received warnings over defiance of hijab rules by their staff and customers.

Authorities also announced on the same day that they had shut down Opal Mall, a massive modern shopping center with over 450 businesses in Tehran. Shargh said the closure of the mall alone affected around 2,500 jobs.

The recent campaign to enforce hijab rules has caused some violent incidents involving pro-hijab vigilantes and women who defy it. A 60-year-old woman had a cardiac arrest this week when a fight broke out between vigilantes and members of her family over hijab.

According to reports, the shipment was unloaded at Aprin dry port -- an inland intermodal terminal near Tehran directly connected by road or rail to a seaport. This shipment includes 1,108 Changan CS35s and 125 Changan CS55s imported by Iranian automaker Saipa.

Mehdi Zeighami, the director of the car import plan at the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, said on Sunday that the import was finally carried out “after a five-year hiatus.” He did not say if this is anyhow related to the impeachment of Industry Minister Reza Fatemi-Amin, who appeared at the parliament on the same day to defend his ministry’s performance about the car industry. Even if it was a publicity stunt by the ministry, it did not prove to be effective as Fatemi-Amin could not convince the lawmakers and was sacked anyway.

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There are a couple of noteworthy points about the plan to import the cars from the Chinese company. The government plans to import about 100,000 cars from one single Chinese state-owned company, Changan Automobile, by the end of the current Iranian year – March 20, 2024. And the entire project will be done by Saipa, one of the Iranian state-owned companies with a monopoly in manufacturing automobiles. The fact that there is no competition in the import project as no businesses can take part in it makes the whole affair more prone to corruption.

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 For years critics and politicians have criticized the government-controlled auto industry and have referred to a “mafia” running the money-losing and inefficient sector. In 2019, it was revealed that these carmakers owed $9 billion, a considerable sum in Iran, due to corruption and mismanagement. "Widespread financial corruption has turned automakers in Iran into a powerful Mafia," a lawmaker said at the time.

The carmakers are unable to satisfy domestic demand and they keep raising prices. The government has long restricted car imports, turning the country into a vast parking lot of dilapidated cars.

Changan Automobile is the smallest of the "Big Four" state-owned car manufacturers in China with an annual production capacity of about two million units. It is not clear how the Iranian government came to the conclusion to choose this particular company or if the company would be able to supply the promised 100,000 cars in addition to its other supply commitments.

Another crucial question is how Iran is planning to pay for 100,000 cars when it is under US banking sanctions. The answer can be simple: Use oil import money China owes in a cars for fuel barter deal.

First, making people so eager to get one of the long-sought-after imported cars that they sign up for the plan and pay in advance for a nebulous purchase; second, a murky contract between two state-owned companies from Iran and China without providing any details about the total amount of transactions and number of cars; third, cashing on people’s money as the price of cars can be updated and increased with every shipment of cars. The whole affair can easily be a method by the regime, which faces difficulties to access its oil revenues, to barter oil for cars with China and get the money from the nation. 

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According to Zeighami, the final price of the imported cars will be announced in the coming weeks. The Central Bank of Iran has blocked at least 96 trillion rials ($2 billion) of prospective customer's money in the cars pre-sales scheme without determining the models of the cars, availability, or the final price since early March. Prospective buyers had to deposit at least five billion rials ($10,000) to book the purchase of an imported car and over 120,000 people signed up for the plan.

Now it is apparent that most of the cars will be Changans, although Zeighami claims that 1,500 other cars will also be imported,which will be from other carmakers such as Fiat, Hyundai, Kia and Mitsubishi.

A lawmaker representing Tehran, Somayeh Rafiei, said in a TV show last week that the axed industry minister told her that the total demand for cars in the country is about two million units.

Iran’s two main carmakers – Saipa and Iran Khodro – can only produce 1,400,000 units of light and heavy vehicles, mostly sub-standard older foreign models.

The chairman of the Association of Car Scrapping Centers said last week that currently 14 to 15 million junk vehicles are on the roads, consuming at least 33 million liters of gasoline (8.7 million gallons) a day.

All things considered, the entire car import scheme and the impeachment of the minister seems like a cunning plot by the government.

On Saturday, Iranians living in Vancouver, Canada, in solidarity with Vahid Beheshti and workers' strikes in Iran, called for increased international pressure against the Islamic Republic. Activists living in Montreal also held demonstrations in solidarity with Vahid Beheshti.

Similar events were held in Berlin, Frankfort, Bonn, Kassel in Germany and also Vienna, Gothenburg and Milan.

In France, Iranians held a protest in Paris and emphasized the need to designate the IRGC as a terrorist arm of the Islamic Republic.

Thousands of others marched in London to 10 Dawning Street to ask the UK to proscribe Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.

The protest rally was attended by activist Vahid Beheshti who has been on a hunger strike in London since February 23 outside the UK Foreign Office to raise awareness for the need to designate the IRGC.

He said he will not back down "even a millimeter from my position" as he risked his well-being for the sake of freedom of speech and human rights.

He said the voice of the huge crowd of Iranians in front of the British Prime Minister's office in London made the UK authorities realize the need to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization.

Several other Iranians have joined Beheshti’s protest action in the past weeks and set up their tents for a sit-in in front of the Foreign Office building.

Reports on social media say the workers went on strike on Sunday demanding a 79% wage increase for the current year.

The plant began operations in 1968 to produce Ammonia, Urea, Phosphoric Acid, Sulphuric Acid, etc. It is also the largest fertilizer producer in Iran.

In 2020, Ali Akbar Ahmadi Dashti, CEO of the company was arrested on charges of financial corruption and a 330,000 USD embezzlement.

Workers in more than 80 companies, including steel workers, across the country joined industrial action, protesting poor working conditions, low wages and rising costs of living, the Council for Organizing Oil Contract-Workers' Protests said April 25.

On Friday, a regime official said four thousand striking energy workers in the energy and petrochemical sectors are being replaced.

In recent years, as the Iranian National Oil Company has ceded many operations to quasi-private companies, most of the work is done by temporary contract workers with little pay and no benefits.

The so-called private companies are controlled by the military or other state entities, or by well-connected regime insiders who quash labor demands by using government security forces.

Labor activists warn that society is on the verge of explosion as strikes reach expand. Experts say there is no end in sight as tensions rise amidst a crumbling economy and the biggest anti-regime sentiment in years.

Reacting to the recent arrest of a group of labor and union activists, Hassan Saeedi, Keyvan Mohtadi and Reza Shahabi, members of the Workers Syndicate of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat-e Vahed), who are imprisoned in the notorious Evin prison, slammed the regime's suppression tactics on the eve of May Day, the international labor day.

They said the security agencies, which do not even respect people's privacy, resort to terror instead of dealing with the problems and resolving them.

"Ignorant of the fact that the people are alert, and bullying will not be tolerated by any part of society, [regime repressions] will only lead to more unity among the protesters," they underlined.

They also called on all trade unions, labor, social and political activists, as well as all the freedom seekers not to remain silent in the face of suppression, and to challenge the brutality of the security apparatus by any means possible.

On Friday, a group of labor activists, who went to visit the family of the imprisoned teacher, Mohammad Habibi, were violently attacked by security agents and arrested.

According to the statement, one of the teachers suffered a heart attack and nine others were taken to Evin prison with some in solitary confinement.

In recent days, a new wave of labor strikes have swept the country, with workers from more than 100 companies and plants involved in the protest movement.

An official at South Pars gas field on the Persian Gulf stated that 4,000 protesting workers will be replaced by new ones.

The Islamic Republic has kept accusing the protesting workers of being encouraged by foreign "enemies".