March 15, 2019
The Newsmaker of the Yearinside Iran this past year was the rapidly shrinking rial and the Newsmakers among the diaspora were the three Iranian-American women elected to state legislatures last November, as selected by the editors of the Iran Times.
Each year, the Iran Times examines its issues for the year and the editors vote on the main Newsmakers inside and outside Iran and the runners-up.
The runners-up this past year are those protesting the dress code inside Iran and all those dual nationals from the diaspora imprisoned by the Iranian state.
Inside Iran, the sickness plaguing the rial has dominated public discussion. The media have often played down the fate of the rial, but this has not stopped discussion and the public is very aware of what is happening to the rial, if not why.
Social media are the key to keeping the public informed and overcoming the efforts of the state to suppress the inconvenient truth from circulating.
The fate of the rial, it should be noted, is of greatest import to those Iranians who live abroad and receive funds from Iran, such as students. For the wealthier living in Iran, the rial’s woes impact their plans for foreign travel. But even the poorest citizen is impacted to some extent as the cost of imported goods rises very soon after the value of the rial falls.
Most of Iran’s food is produced locally, but a significant minority is imported—and even domestic output often uses imported seeds and fertilizer.
Many components of Iranian-made products are imported and much of the machinery used to make goods in Iran is imported, so the decline of the rial penetrates to every corner of the economy.
Abroad, the Iran Times editors selected the three Iranian-American women who won first-time election last November to three state legislatures as the Newsmakers of the Year. This makes them the highest-ranking Iranian officeholders in the United States after Cyrus Habib, who is the lieutenant governor of Washington State.
The trio are: Anna Eskamani, elected to the Florida House with 57 percent of the vote; Anna Monahemi Kaplan, elected to the New York State Senate with 55 percent; and Zahra Karinshak, elected to the Georgia State Senate with 53 percent. All are Democrats.
Eskamani faced an opponent who tried to use her Iranian heritage against her, but the attempt failed miserably. In Kaplan’s race, both parties invested heavily because control of the state Senate was at stake; Kaplan ousted a Republican incumbent to put Democrats in the majority. Karinshak, a US Force Academy graduate, ran in a rural district where strange names often repel voters; she was massively outspent by her GOP opponent but still won a majority.
In California, a male, Adrin Nazarian, who was born in Tehran to an Armenian family, has served in the State Assembly since 2012 and was easily re-elected.
As runners-up, the Iran Times selected those inside Iran protesting the dress code and outside Iran the growing numbers of expats, dual nationals, being tossed in jail when they visit Iran.
The dress code protests began at the end of December 2017, encouraged by Masumeh Alinejad, who runs a website on women’s issues from her home in New York. About three-dozen women were arrested last year for following her suggestion for women to stand on a high spot, most commonly a utility box, wrap their headscarf around a stick and wave it above the crowd.
The protests commonly draw a small crowd of people voicing support and a handful of people shouting obscenities at the protesters. The protesters seem to draw the greatest and most vocal support when the police try to arrest a protestor.
As runners-up in the diaspora, the Iran Times selected the dozens of jailed dual nationals. Of course, they are not living abroad at the moment! They are little known inside Iran where the government says little and neither the official media nor the social media report very much about them.
As near as the Iran Times can track them, there are now 20 dual national expatriates and foreigners jailed in Iran, including both Iranians naturalized in another country and those who hold legal residency abroad. They include 10 from the United States and two from Canada.
The two from Canada are Saeed Malekpour, a permanent resident jailed since 2008, and Abdul-Rasul Dori-Esfahani, an accountant who served on the Iranian team negotiating the nuclear deal and who dealt with sanctions issues.
Those from the United States are Robert White, who has no Iranian background but was arrested while visiting a girlfriend in Mashhad last year, Wang Xiyue, a dual Chinese-American arrested as a spy for photocopying Qajar-era documents in the National Library, Morad Tahbaz, one of the environmentalists arrested last year and currently on trial, Baquer and Siamak Namazi, who are father and son, Karan Vafadari and Afarin Neysari, who are husband and wife, retired FBI agent Robert Levinson and an unnamed person Iran said it arrested for fraud for offering to sell Green Cards to Iranians. Also Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese national with a US green card is imprisoned.
