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IRAN: Street vendors harassed in Ahwaz

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NCRI – According to reports from inside Iran, in the past two weeks street vendors in Ahwaz, southwestern Iran, have been subject to harassment by municipal agents.

On May 16, municipal agents surrounded the street vendors market in Naderi Street in Ahwaz and prevented people from entering the market, thus preventing the vendors’ from working. This action is thought to be a reprisal against vendors who recently protested their work conditions.

On May 10, a number of the street vendors of Naderi Street staged a gathering to protest the unsuitable location of their businesses. Similarly, on May 3 they gathered in front of the Governor’s Building and demanded a place be allocated to them for their work.

The vendors carried placards which read “Vendors have no bread, have right to life” and “A piece of justly-earned bread is our right” and demanded a more suitable place for their work.

On May 6, one of these vendors threw himself under a train and lost his life in protest against the confiscation of his property by municipal agents. The victim, Mehdi Afravi, had no other means of livelihood for his family, and the municipal agents had deprived him of that by confiscating his goods.

The Tasnim News Agency, affiliated to the regime’s Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, on May 15 reported Jalal Kazemi, a member of the regime’s Parliament, as saying “We have to acknowledge that the domestic situation, especially in the realm of livelihood and economy, is not befitting of the Islamic Iran in the region and the world. The economic growth rate is very low if not negative and the unemployment of the young, particularly the educated, is like a time bomb ticking towards zero.”

Nasser Seraj, head of the regime’s Department of Inspections, in an interview with the regime’s official IRNA news agency, announced on November 25, 2015: “Someone received oil from Iran’s Ministry of Petroleum and we’re to pay the government for it, but he has taken around $30 million and run away to Canada.”