By Jubin Katiraie
In Iran when one hears the word deprivation, the people of Sistan and Baluchistan Province automatically come to mind. People who have endured years of suffering and poverty, surrounded by hardship and pain.
Seeing the hardships that people endure in cities and villages of this province raises the question, is this part of Iran?
It’s hard to believe, but that’s the reality, as can be seen. There is a multitude of questions surrounding why the situation of the people of this region is so full of hardship.
Why do people live in worn-out infrastructure after forty years of the rule of this regime? Why are children missing school, classes and a standard educational system?
Why are there no proper roads in this region and that roads that exist are extremely vulnerable, and have been destroyed by the latest flood?
And hundreds of other questions that have been left unanswered in this regime. But the reality is clear, and even the Khamenei regime’s state media admit to these atrocities, and there is nothing left to hide from the eyes of the Iranian people, and the officials have to admit it.
The floods in January also destroyed many properties of the people. Clay and mud houses of the people were destroyed. Their land, which has been cultivated with hard work, was crushed in less than a few hours.
Some wheat flour, which was used for current consumption, was destroyed. Hungry and tired people, to save their lives, they had to stay on top of the trees for some time.
Their cattle were lost in the devastating flood, leaving nothing to them, in the shadow of a state of thieves and robbers, thousands of people in this deprived and homeless area now have more scars on their bodies from this disaster.
The state-run Arman newspaper wrote on 22 January 2020: “While 80% of rural infrastructure is gone, there are no cattle left for the people and no home for life. It is now the agricultural season and the peak of the planting of vegetables, but all the bananas, olives, eggplants and tomatoes have also been destroyed in these areas. “
The effects of this devastating flood will continue for a long time, and a regime that is plagued by emergent crises does not have the capacity to cure the pains of the disadvantaged. Even though the economic crises that the government is involved in, due to past catastrophic experiences, hurt the Iranian people, but the Iranian government did nothing for the people.
According to the regime’s officials, the flood of the 2019 spring caused 38 billion tomans damages to the people. The Kermanshah earthquake has not yet recovered from the devastation, and hundreds of other earthquakes, such as old wounds on people’s lives, will never heal with this corrupt government.
The existence of these wounds and injuries cannot be denied, and even the regime’s media admit it:
Arman newspaper (22 January 2020): “Reporters were sent to depict flood damage in the area, shocked by the poverty of local people. In a way, all the images sent to the virtual networks were from poverty, not flood damage. Because they were told of children walking barefoot and seeing houses made of foliage.”
The lives of the deprived people in this area, like other deprived areas of Iran, represent a government that has never been and does not seek the well-being of the people. The devastation caused by the floods reflects the government’s record that for forty years people have been suffering from poorness and deprivation.
But on the other hand, in order to advance the policy of assassination and the export of fundamentalism, it spends the highest costs out of the pockets of these disadvantaged people in the Middle East and elsewhere.
“Expenditures in the Iraq, Syria and Yemen conflicts are estimated to have cost the Iranian economy as much as US$16bn.These costs are in addition to as much as US$700 million reportedly paid annually to Lebanese Hizbullah, as well as millions of dollars to various Palestinian militants”, IISS wrote in November 2019.
Now, with the shaky economy of the mullahs’ regime, what can be expected, to care about deprived areas, assistance to flood-stricken and earthquake-prone areas, and other deprived areas that have endured the toughest livelihood pressures this year.
It is enough to look at the roots of the people’s protests in November, which is the explosive situation of the Iranian society, and the source of this situation is nothing other than the regime itself, which cannot solve any of hundreds of problems of the people.
Forty years of looting and corruption by criminal mullahs have proven that expecting Ali Khamenei’s rule to solve people’s problems is no more than a mirage, and the only solution is to overthrow it.
