December 23, 2016
The Pasdaran have publicly expressed irritation with Iran’s national shipping line for contracting with a South Korean shipyard to build 10 new vessels rather than having the Pasdaran do the work.
It has even asked President Rohani to cancel the deal with the South Korean shipyard. The open question is whether it plans to throw its weight around to make sure the deal is killed.
The Pasdaran’s shipyard could probably build the small tankers that the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line (IRISL) has ordered from Hyundai Heavy Industries, but it is unlikely to be capable of building the giant container ships IRISL has also ordered.
“They are worried about competition internally,” Alireza Nader, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, told The Associated Press. “They want to make sure, for any given deal, they get a part of it.”
The Pasdaran weren’t subtle about their opposition to the deal with South Korea.
“At a time when we are faced with the problem of youth unemployment in our country, unfortunately, we have heard that the contract to build 10 ships has been signed with South Korea, and I hope it is not true and it has not been signed yet,” Pasdar Gen. Ebadollah Abdollahi said Sunday. “Is it a lack of respect for our domestic capabilities? If it is true, we request the president to cancel this deal.”
The Pasdaran or Revolutionary Guards are not just a military outfit. At the end of the Iran-Iraq war, they were tasked to use their engineering talent to do construction work specifically to provide jobs for the soldiers being demobilized.
Today, the Pasdaran run a massive construction company, Khatam ol-Anbiya, with 135,000 employees handling civil development, oil industry work and defense projects. Pasdar firms build roads, staff ports, run telecommunication networks and even conduct laser eye surgery.
The exact scope of all its business holdings remains unclear. The Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has been critical of the nuclear deal with Iran, estimates the Pasdaran control “between 20 and 40 percent of the economy” through significant influence in at least 229 companies.
Among the firms is the Iran Marine Industrial Co., a shipbuilding and repair company. The AP said the company, known by the acronym SADRA, lost out on the IRISL contract, likely spurring Abdollahi’s comments.
Part of the Pasdar concern may stem from the oversized role it took on in Iran’s economy the past few years during sanctions, said Afshon Ostovar, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in the United States, who recently published book on the Pasdaran.
“The door is open to doing deals with the West and they don’t want those doors to be floodgates,” Ostovar said. “They want them to be a tiny little window where very discrete, deliberate transactions happen, but not just sort of a gold rush for both the West and for Iranians trying to make a buck.”
