
July 17, 2015
This one is for the History books: Sarajevo would be almost entirely destroyed during the Bosnian war some 20 years after I took this picture.
This one is for the History books: Sarajevo would be almost entirely destroyed during the Bosnian war some 20 years after I took this picture.
At the Grand Bazaar in Tehran
-Analysis-
As inflation in Iran spikes to record heights, President Ebrahim Raisi and his Economy Minister Ehsan Khanduzi insist the government is working to curb the price hikes wreaking havoc on household budgets. Yet there is very little in Raisi's year-long record to indicate earnestness in getting a grip on inflation or mitigating its impact on the poor. The endemic inflation of the last four decades, and particularly the explosive inflation of the last three years, are forging a frightening picture of daily life for many Iranians.
In April-May this year, consumer prices had risen 52.5% year-on-year, though the annual inflation rate for foodstuffs stood at 81.6% in those weeks. The rates are based on figures given by the Iran Statistics Organization and the Central Bank, which many observers believe are notched down. But even they show an average rate of over 40% for the past three years and over 20% in the past three decades. Per capita earnings meanwhile have fallen while all welfare and consumer indicators are in free-fall.
Separately, Iranians are thought to be paying 15 times as much in taxes this year as in 2011-12. The only thing that has missed the inflationary rocket is wages.
Every year, the purchasing power of vulnerable groups like pensioners or working-class families buckles under the pressure of inflation as prices leap ahead of stable wages. The government raised state-sector wages by no more than 10% in the Persian year to March 20, 2022. That has pushed millions of state-sector employees and their households below the poverty line.
The family has become one of the most vulnerable of social units in Iran
Four decades of inflationary conditions of varying intensity have had and will have long-term socio-economic and cultural effects. Large sectors of society have ended all spending on leisure, travel, culture, eating out and extra-curricular studies. Currently, many are trying to pay the rent without cutting on food.
Even reducing some of the items in a standard family basket of goods, households are finding it hard to pay rent and eat properly. There have been recurring reports recently of falling demand for basic foods including meat, chicken and dairies. The head of an association of fruit and vegetable retailers recently reported a 25-30% drop in demand for fruit over a week. Fruit was already a luxury in Iran, and as a senior nutritionist at the Health Ministry stated six years ago, 88% of Iranians were not eating enough of them.
Most figures out of Iran will confirm that numerous households are reducing or altering their nutrition to dangerously poor levels, and malnutrition will likely affect the health of future generations.
The family has become one of the most vulnerable of social units in Iran. Many people work several shifts to make ends meet, prompting distancing, stress and dismay inside families. Stress can undermine the affection children need. Down the line it can provoke failed studies, misdemeanors or addiction.
The middle class is another victim of the inflationary hurricane, being hit by falling purchasing power and a crisis in their sense of identity and belonging in Iran. This decline has prompted many of its members to move into cheaper residential districts. Perhaps the effects of impoverishment on them are not yet as grave as they have been on the poor: in their case, inflation is hastening such trends as increased criminality, addiction, child labor, child marriages or homelessness.
When people lose hope in the here and now, they will seek a way out
Inflation has also encouraged social exclusion and discouraged voluntary activities and even attention to environmental issues or ethical questions like animal rights.
While in many countries the state meets some very basic needs of the poor such as healthcare and schooling, such rights are now far from assured in Iran. Online schooling during the pandemic, for example, became extremely difficult for families without access to tablets or computers, or in those parts of Iran where Internet access is sketchy.
The Iran Statistics Organization estimates that a million Iranian youngsters missed the 2020-21 school year for a range of reasons, and a few thousand more are likely to miss school this year because of growing poverty. Persistent schooling gaps now will only feed economic poverty in coming years, as children will grow up without the skills the job market may require.
When people lose hope in the here and now, they will seek a way out, including by leaving the country. Iran has been losing a vital workforce for some years now.
But much more threatening to the Islamic Republic is the enormous and growing gap between most Iranians and a ruling minority whose corruption and ruthlessness is leading the country toward utter ruin.
There is only so much people can take. In Iran, that pressure may finally push millions of desperate citizens onto the path of ridding themselves of an erratic and hated regime.
The war in Ukraine and the climate crisis have been devastating for food production. Here's a look at some of the traditional foods from around the world that might be hard to find on supermarket shelves.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.