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Frank Gallagher

Mousavi running a novel campaign - The National Newspaper - 0 views

www.thenational.ae/...704279852

iran election musavi reformist iranjune12

shared by Frank Gallagher on 28 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Mr Mousavi applied to authorities for his own newspaper licence after his self-nomination in March, but he has yet not been awarded one.
  • At 25 rials (one fils) per copy, Andishe Nou costs much less than the cheapest newspaper in circulation. State-sponsored papers cost about 500 rials while privately produced publications can cost up to 5,000 rials.
    • Frank Gallagher
      Frank Gallagher on 28 Apr 09
       
      I wonder what the total cost would be, and whether other candidates would be able to afford it. Campaign budgets in Iran? No idea.
  • Despite his new methods, Mr Mousavi’s campaign mainly relies on support from ordinary individuals and does not have a big campaign operation.
    • Frank Gallagher
      Frank Gallagher on 28 Apr 09
       
      If true, it's odd that he's gone for participation alone rather than combining it with the kind of big operation he can supposedly afford.
  • Frank Gallagher on 28 Apr 09
     
    Interesting notes on Musavi's election campaign. Low-key, emphasis on popular participation, and publishing a cheap 1-sheet newspaper without a license.
Frank Gallagher

Profile of Mojtaba Khamenei - Tehran Bureau - 0 views

tehranbureau.com/man-shadow-mojtaba-khamenei

Basij

shared by Frank Gallagher on 19 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Karroubi was certainly not the first senior figure to protest Mojtaba Khamenei’s intervention on behalf of the extreme right. Before him, Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, another former Speaker of the Majles and a close aid to Ayatollah Khamenei, had quietly protested the younger Khamenei’s meddling in the political process. (Nategh Nouri, a mid-rank cleric, heads the Supreme Leader’s Office of Inspection)
  • In the last year before the 1979 Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei and two other clerics, Abbas Vaez Tabasi and Sayyed Abdolkarim Hasheminejad, formed a sort of leadership ring that led most of the demonstrations and political activities against the Shah in Mashhad and the Khorasan province, which was Iran’s largest province at that time.
  • Vaez Tabasi is now a powerful cleric who runs the shrine of Imam Reza (the Shiites’ 8th Imam), in Mashhad. He is believed to be a Rafsanjani ally.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • His son, Mojtaba, attended Alavi High School, a private religious school with a rigorous course load. (The school is located on Iran Street in central Tehran, where the author grew up.) Many of Iran’s present leaders are graduates of this high school.
  • His first teachers were his own father and Ayatollah Sayyed Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the current judiciary chief. Mojtaba was not a cleric yet. In 1999, he moved to Qom to study to join the ranks of clerics. He was taught there by conservative and ultraconservative clerics such as Mesbah Yazdi; Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpayegani, the first Secretary-General of the Guardian Council in the 1980s; and Ayatollah Sayyed Mohsen Kharrazi, the father of former foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi. (Kharrazi’s real name is Sayyed Mohsen Agha Mir Mohammad Ali and his daughter is married to Mojtaba’s younger brother, Mohsen, a junior cleric.)
  • Mojtaba Khamenei is also very close to Ayatollah Abolghasem Khazali,
  • One link is a mysterious figure not known to most Iranians. His name is Ayatollah Aziz Khoshvaght, who is a great supporter of Mojtaba Khamenei. Ayatollah Khamenei’s third child, Mostafa (Mojtaba’s older brother), is married to Khoshvaght’s daughter.
  • Khoshvaght is the prayer leader of a large mosque in northern Tehran, and a radical hardliner. Saeed Emami, the notorious figure who was responsible for the infamous Chain Murders in the fall of 1998, which resulted in the murder of six Iranian dissidents (and the murder of close to 70 other dissidents from 1988-1998), was a follower of Khoshvaght.
  • Khoshvaght is also close to and influential in the affairs of Ansar-e Hezbollah,
  • Mojtaba Khamenei and the paramilitary groups is Brigadier General Sayyed Mohammad Hejazi,
  • The third link between Mojtaba Khamenei and the paramilitary groups is Hassan Taeb, the current commander of the Basij. A hardliner and cleric, he is also linked with Mesbah Yazdi and his followers.
  • Other relatively young radicals and disciples of Mesbah Yazdi include Mohsen Gharavian and Ghassem Ravanbakhsh. The former always attempts to present a moderate and reasonable image of Mesbah Yazdi and his thinking, whereas the latter who is the editor-in-chief of Partow Sokhan, the weekly published by Mesbah Yazdi, is virulently opposed to the reformist-democratic movement.
  • However, many clerics in Qom dispute Mojataba Khamenei’s religious credentials.
  • There have been persistent rumors that Brigadier General Ali Fazli, who lost his left eye in the Iran-Iraq war, the commander of the IRGC forces in the Tehran province, has been opposed to the harsh crackdown on the protesters and demonstrators (reportedly ordered by Mojtaba Khamenei). Both he and Major General Mohammad Ali (Aziz) Jafari, the top commender of the IRGC, are said to be opposed to Mojtaba Khamenei’s meddling and power plays.
  • Mojtaba Khamenei is married to a daughter of Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, a university professor and former conservative Speaker of the Majles. After he was elected the Speaker of the 8th Majles in 2004, Haddad Adel once said, “We were told [by Ayatollah Khamenei] to be here [in the Majles to control it for the Ayatollah],” for which he was widely mocked by the reformists. But this statement indicated how the Ayatollah was putting his loyalists everywhere. Ayatollah Khamenei’s oldest daughter is married to Hojatoleslam Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, his chief of staff.
Frank Gallagher

Tough Times Ahead for the Iranian Economy - Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...0406_iran_salehi_isfahani.aspx

Iran Economy Inflation Debt Blance of Payments Brookings

shared by Frank Gallagher on 09 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Iran’s economy is facing at least three large imbalances. The most acute is in the balance of payments.
  • Already some candidates are whispering that they favor lowering the exchange rate (increasing the value of the rial relative to other currencies) in order to fight inflation. These candidates would lead voters to believe that they can have their cake and eat it too
  • In these times of frozen international credit markets and economic sanctions against Iran, the second option of foreign borrowing is less likely than it was in the 1990s, but the risk of state-owned enterprises racking up foreign debts using short-term credit from eager overseas suppliers is not altogether gone. This is precisely what they did in the early 1990s, which deepened the post-oil boom slump and halted Rafsanjani’s reforms. Anticipating devaluation and government bailout, these enterprises incurred $10 billion in new short term debt alone between 1991 and 1993. Their actions forced the highly anticipated devaluation of the rial by a factor of 27 during the same period and forced the government to accept this debt as its own.
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  • Repeating the past is more likely to come in the form of the politically more palatable option of simply cutting imports. Such a policy will be costly in terms of jobs and growth, but will unfortunately appeal to any one of the current leading candidates (Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Moussavi, and Ahmadinejad), all of whom have strong dirigiste tendencies and would welcome the power over the private sector which comes with overseeing the allocation of the anticipated $40 billion of oil earnings to industries and individuals.
  • The second imbalance is in the government budget.
  • if the past is any guide, investment will take the biggest hit.
    • Frank Gallagher
      Frank Gallagher on 09 Jun 09
       
      This pattern has been repeated during Ahmadinejad's term. Soft loans were given out in order to spur the construction of new businesses, but investment levels fell as the new money was either consumed (from imports) or poured into the real estate bubble.
  • The third imbalance is in the country’s financial markets
  • Frank Gallagher on 09 Jun 09
     
    Good backgrounder on the economic hurdles for whoever wins this Friday
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