Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, still has a year left to serve as President (image source: Wikimedia Commons)
Iran has been in the headlines of the Western media quite a lot lately. Tensions over its nuclear program threatens brash action from Israel, and the issue has managed so far to dog the US election campaign. Behind all this, for many months now, the West has been ratcheting up sanctions against Iran in an attempt to force Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into opening up, or indeed, cancelling its nuclear program. It appears that the side-effects of sanctions maybe gaining some traction within Iran.
Demonstrators in Iran clashed with police Wednesday, Ramin Mostaghim and Patrick J. McDonnell from the LA Times report, in protests that have been linked with the nation’s fading national currency. Some 500 shop owners, usually a more complacent element of Iranian society, marched in Tehran to voice their concerns.
The protesters described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government as “inefficient”, while also complaining about the flow of financial aid into Syria, supporting its struggling president, Bashar Assad. Over the last 12 months, Iran’s currency, the rial, has lost almost 80% of its value against the US dollar, leaving shop-owners unwilling to sell goods in fear of not being being able to purchase more due to the rial’s deflated value.
The downwards spiral of the rial, according to Robert Tait from the Sydney Morning Herald, is directly in response to Western sanctions, which have imposed a reduction of export of Iranian oil from 2.5 million barrels per day last year, to only 1.1 million barrels this august.
This all coincides with a US court formally ordering al-Queda, Iran and several other defendants (including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) to pay $6 billion in compensation to US victims of the September 11 attacks (Herald Sun).
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