Over 500 Workers Collapsed From Heatstroke In Iran
More than 500 workers of different oil and gas projects in southern Iran have been hospitalized with a number of them dead due to high temperatures in recent days.
More than 500 workers of different oil and gas projects in southern Iran have been hospitalized with a number of them dead due to high temperatures in recent days.
An oil sector wokers' union announced on Saturday that at least two people have died this week in the city of Abadan due to heatstroke and weakness caused by hours of exhausting work in extreme heat.
Two weeks ago another worker died during work in the provincial capital of oil-rich Khuzestan while the government offices and businesses were closed due to high temparatures.
Despite temperatures rising to more than 50 degrees Celsius – about 122 in Fahrenheit scale – in the southern parts of the country, where most of the oil and gas plants are located, subcontractors for the government refuse to stop work even for a few hours.
According to reports, the working conditions in the port city of Asaluyeh in Bushehr province is so bad that at least 100 workers are taken to hospitals for heatstroke daily, as the temperature has reached 53 degrees and the humidity is over 90 percent.
Amid a dire economic situation in Iran at least 10 workers have committed suicide in the last three months due to dismissal from their jobs and "livelihood problems". The latest happened on Saturday in the western city of Ilam.
With food prices rising faster after four years of United States’ ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, Iranian workers and retirees have been holding regular protests or strikes to demand higher salaries.
In May, widespread protests by workers, shop owners, and teachers against poverty, inflation, and low wages, were met with heavy-handed crackdown and numerous arrests by security forces.
The economic failure of President Ebrahim Raisi’s government has become clear to most Iranians, including the ultraconservatives or hardliners who fully backed him one year ago as he took office. Mokhber is Raisi’s economic czar who can be easily blamed for a 54-percent inflation rate and rising poverty with its political implications.
The economic crisis did not start with Raisi. Iran’s situation quickly deteriorated when the United States withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2018 and imposed crippling sanction. It was a repeat of early 2010s, when the United Nations imposed sanctions on Iran for pursuing a dangerous nuclear program. However, the Raisi government is being blamed for a high degree of inefficiency, lack of planning and highly questionable appointments.
Proreform daily Arman Melli wrote in a report on its Saturday that a demand to fire Mokhber is a message the conservative camp has been lately sending to president Raisi. According to the daily, this group of Iranian conservatives are determined to prove that the Raisi administration is inefficient.
The paper wrote that some Iranian conservatives wanted a hardliner politician as vice President last year, but Raisi chose to work with Mokhber, who was a key official in the business conglomerates operating under the aegis of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
One year after his appointment as vice president, it is still not quite clear whether it was Raisi who asked Mokhber to join his cabinet or Khamenei, who knew Raisi did not have any executive experience, planted Mokhber in the government to make up for Raisi's shortcomings.
The report says that some ultraconservatives such as Javad Karimi Qoddousi: "I wish to tell the President that Mr. Mokhber lacks the capabilities required for his post. His staying in this position even for one hour will lead to losses for the government."
The ultraconservatives have also mentioned the discord between Mokhber and the other members of Raisi's economic team, particularly Vice President for Economic Affairs Mohsen Rezaei, as another reason for Mokhber's dismissal.
Last week, a big gaffe by Mokber led to a lot of public ridicule. A lookalike of American actor Johnny Depp showed up at a religious mourning ceremony and Mokhber tweeted, praising Depp for taking part in a Shiite religious event. When social media users and politicians reminded him that the person was only a lookalike of the US actor, Mokhber's office claimed that his tweet was somehow fabricated.
All these could be more meaningful with a report in reformist Shargh newspaper that went viral on Saturday. The report by its editor Ahmad Gholami said that "the Raisi administration is a continuation of the government of populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that it will inevitably sink in the same quagmire that Ahmadinejad's administration faced."
Gholami argued that both Ahmadinejad and Raisi started their terms of office by promising they would change everything, but Ahmadinejad gradually failed as economic conditions worsened in the early 2010s with UN sanctions.
Shargh's editor predicted that the Raisi administration will eventually suffer the same fate. However, to be fair and on the safe side, Gholami observed that the Raisi is shouldering a heavier burden of all sorts of economic problems that have accumulated during his predecessors and it is highly unlikely that he could find a way out of those problems as all roads ahead inevitably lead to the same quagmire.
Iran’s government and top officials have not reacted to the attack in New York on Friday. While the hardliner media have welcomed the move implicitly or even openly, praising the assailant. Kayhan daily linked to the Supreme Leader, for instance on Saturday said “a thousand bravos” to the man who attacked Rushdie, implying that his throat should have been cut. In its Sunday edition, the paper said, “divine vengeance befell Salma Rushdie” and predicted that former US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are next.
Some Iranian media and political figures have adopted a different tact accusing opponents of the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal of using the attack on Salman Rushdie as a means of sabotaging a possible nuclear agreement.
Proponents of the conspiracy theory claim there is a possible involvement of Iran’s opponents, particularly Israel, who want to discredit the Iranian government and sabotage agreement on the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and lifting of US sanctions.
Hardliner Mohammad Marandi who has acted as a spokesman-cum-advisor of the Iranian negotiators in Vienna nuclear talks, tweeted that he would not be shedding tears “for a writer who spouts hatred and contempt for Muslims and Islam” but went on to ask if it “isn’t odd that as we near a potential nuclear deal, the US makes claims about a hit on Bolton... and then this happens?”
“I'm not an exponent of conspiracy theories, but simultaneousness of the news about plans to assassinate [John] Bolton and the attack on Rushdie with the finalization of talks to restore the JCPOA isn’t not credible to me,” reformist' politician and commentator Abbas Abdi who is an ardent critic of the Raisi government, tweeted.
It is quite possible that the recent ‘plots’ against US officials and citizen as well as Rushdie were organized by the Israeli intelligence to prevent diplomatic solutions to the disputes between Tehran and Washington, Reza Nasri, a commentaor said in a tweet while in a commentary Saturday the conservative Alef news website said the West would devise ‘propaganda scenarios’ against Iran revolving around the attack on Rushdie.
Others on social media have seen these statements as an attempt by Iran to create confusion to deflect blame for a death fatwa issued 34 years ago against Rushdie that could have led to the Friday knife attack.
The 15 Khordad Foundation, a charity organization that put the multi-million-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head in 1989 and even increased it by half a million to $3.3 million in 2012, has so far remained silent about the assassination attempt.
Hadi Matar (24), the suspect in the stabbing of Rushdie at an event in New York state, has now been charged with attempted murder and is being held without bond, prosecutors in Chautauqua County said on Saturday.
A preliminary law enforcement review of Matar's social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shi'ite extremism and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), although no definitive links had been found, according to NBC New York.
In the US, Republicans have demanded that the Biden administration must put an end to negotiations with Iran in view of the terrorist act against Rushdie sanctioned by Khomeini's fatwa as well as the alleged recent Iranian plots against US officials and citizens including John Bolton, Mark Pompeo, and Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American activist.
