1989, the year when Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (acting commander in chief of the armed forces in 1988-1989) -- the man defeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the runoff last year -- assumed the Presidency of Iran.
What did these university students want the Iranian people to do last year -- vote for the man who was the President in 1989?
> The
> significance of this fact can only be realised if you know that this period
> coincided with major interventions by the World Bank and the IMF in Iran
> leading to imposition of neo liberal solutions on Iran's economy. It was
> after this period that the policy of economic adjustment started in Iran,
> with disastrous consequences for the working masses.
On 8/6/06, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance of such matters, but why, with all its
> petro-dollars, did (does?) Iran need the World Bank and IMF?
Oil states can need external public debts, especially if governments run large budget deficits. Iran — Debt - External: $ 13,400,000,000 According to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2079rank.html Venezuela — Debt - External: $ 33,290,000,000 According to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2079rank.html
Setting that aside, do these university students realize that, in 1989, Iran, after the devastating Iran-Iraq War (which killed about 300,000 Iranians and 375,000 Iraqis), really, seriously needed money to reconstruct the nation's war-ravaged infrastructure* and take care of the war wounded** and internally displaced*** (in addition to the 2.3 million Afghan refugees and some 360,000 Iraqi dissidents whom Iran was hosting)?
* Homes, schools, factories, dams, bridges, power plants, irrigation networks, oil installations, ports, railroads, and so on -- especially in the four border provinces -- all had to be rebuilt. Iran lost the port of Khorramshahr, the largest port of Iran, early in the war; it was recaptured in 1982 but remained inoperable till the end of the war permitted reconstruction. Abadan, Iran's largest oil refinery complex, was damaged and made unusable in 1980. Abadan didn't begin to match the pre-war level of production till 1997.
** The 1988 estimates of the war wounded were in the range of 400,000 - 700,000, half of whom were permanently disabled. *** The war made about 1.6 million Iranians homeless, most of them in 1980-81, when the Iraqi military devastated Khuzistan province.
Reference: Eric Hooglund, The Islamic Republic at War and Peace, Middle East Report, January-February 1989. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>