An investigative report on the increase in suicides due to livelihood reasons in Iran; from the collapse of the meaning of hope and future to the claim of eradicating absolute poverty in two weeks
The consequences of discrimination and inequality among different strata and groups in Iranian society take various forms. Undoubtedly, being forced to commit suicide is the most bitter form of the consequences of discrimination; people who are forced by the pressure of discrimination, poverty, and inequality to carve the end of their lives on the page of existence.
In the past year, there has been a lot of news about suicides of students, workers, teachers, and other segments of society. Citizens who committed suicide specifically due to difficult living conditions and economic discrimination. Bitter but frank narratives of today's conditions in Iran and revealing hidden dimensions of deep inequality that is taking place in different social layers. The psychological and spiritual consequences of living pressure on different segments of society are showing their bitter forms more than before while the authorities, and at the top of them, the head of the executive branch, Ebrahim Raisi, with their positions, policies, and approaches, are causing the narrative of "despair" to prevail among different segments of society and destroying the meaning of "future" in the eyes of a large group of Iranians. The bitter path of "despair" that may lead to the suicide of people suffering from discrimination has been taken in connection with conditions that were and are undoubtedly the founders of the country's executive authorities and political decision-makers. Therefore, reviewing the cases of suicide among workers, students, and teachers in recent years, which have been specifically due to livelihood difficulties, can be a path to understanding the bitter and common consequences of the oppression inflicted by power on different groups in society. A path that also highlights the importance of connecting the demands of the strata subject to discrimination and inequality.
The hardships of student-worker life
The Espinas Hotel Tehran is a five-star hotel in the capital of Iran. A hotel with many modern facilities. It hosts many famous people; from athletes to government officials and officials. A towering building with a helicopter landing pad on its roof to fully maintain the image of an international hotel. On February 14 of this year, however, the name of the Espinas Hotel Tehran was not mentioned in the news due to the presence of famous guests or the landing of an official's helicopter on the roof of the hotel. The news was short and painful; Moin Ahmadi, a 1996 incoming undergraduate student of the Aerospace Department at Khajeh Nasir Toosi University, committed suicide after working for hours at the Espinas Hotel Tehran.
Undoubtedly, in recent years, economic and livelihood discrimination has been an important reason for suicide among students. Therefore, paying attention to the news of the suicide of Moein Ahmadi, a student of the aerospace department at Khajeh Nasir Toosi University due to work pressure at the Spinas Hotel in Tehran, makes it necessary to pay attention to an important issue, which is the difficult living conditions of students and workers in Iran. An issue through which we can address the issue of the rights of two important groups in society, workers and students, and of course the links between these two groups.
Moin Ahmadi's bitter decision to end his life is perhaps a mental knot for many students who are forced to endure difficult and unequal working conditions to make ends meet and even help their families. Although there are no exact statistics on students who have committed suicide due to livelihood problems and being forced to endure bad working conditions, there are many stories about the increasing livelihood pressures and subsequent mental crises for students, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which indicates the serious link between livelihood discrimination and suicide attempts among students.
The hidden hardships of the lives of underprivileged students
Many studies in recent years have shown that the desire to commit suicide among students has become much higher than before. In March 2018, the Student Affairs Organization published a program titled “Comprehensive Program for Suicide Prevention and Intervention in University Environments,” which stated that about 17 percent of students were considering suicide. The report stated that, according to statistics from the Forensic Medicine Organization, 3.66 out of 100,000 students lost their lives to suicide in 2017. The report stated that for every suicide, there may be 10 to 20 suicide attempts, and the risk of complete suicide following a single attempt can increase by up to 32 percent.
A student living in Tehran who spent three years of his studies in a student dormitory told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, referring to the issue of suicide among students, "The problem is that dealing with the issue of suicide among students, especially in student dormitories, is still defined by the students' mental, psychological, and personal problems, while the reality is something else."
According to this student living in Tehran, "student life" no longer has the same meaning as it once did: "In the past, an important part of student life was defined outside the university environment, but today that part of student life has given way to the toil and patience needed to earn money."
Mohammad, who faced the closure of student dormitories due to the coronavirus in his final year of studies and was forced to live in a boarding house, says, "Many underprivileged students who come to Tehran from small cities basically do not have much financial support from their families and very soon have to look for work to cover their education and living expenses. But this is only part of the story, because sometimes the coming of students, especially boys, to Tehran is not just an educational migration from the families' perspective, but there is also an expectation of earning income from the students. This issue somehow increases the pressure on students to find work in the capital."
In recent years, the cost of university education has become very heavy and backbreaking for the lower classes of society and the underprivileged. The costs at non-profit universities are much higher. For this reason, many students have to accept that they have to do many jobs that are not at all suitable for students. This is while they face certain forms of discrimination in employment, mainly because they are "students"; most of them cannot have long-term and full-time jobs and are forced to work "without a contract" and many also work in informal jobs, so to speak. In this sense, labor laws do not cover the conditions of many students who work.
On Thursday, December 10, 2020, news of the death of Ashkan Fathi, a student at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Tehran, was published in the media. He had gone to Bushehr to work as a laborer and drowned in the river during the Bushehr flood while returning home from work.
This student was a resident of one of the most deprived areas of Behbahan, studying communication sciences in the full-time course at the University of Tehran, and some of his classmates wrote that he was “forced to work in order to obtain a mobile phone.” The story of Ashkan Fathi’s bitter death is another example of the consequences of discrimination and inequality that can be examined precisely at the point of intersection of the crises of a large segment of students and workers.
Farzaneh, a former student at the University of Arts in Tehran who was forced to drop out of university after the coronavirus outbreak and the loss of her part-time job at a clothing store, told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, “For girls like me who come to Tehran from the countryside and find jobs with a thousand rewards and dream of building a life, the conditions are much more difficult and complicated. Many were forced to return to the countryside and stop studying after the dormitories were closed and they were unable to afford living expenses in Tehran.” According to this former student, “For many female students who come to Tehran from the countryside, the important issue from the very beginning is trying to gain independence. Independence that many of their families do not agree with so easily. That means we have to fight on two fronts.”
The problems and hardships in the lives of underprivileged students have increased their psychological vulnerability. The closure of dormitories has forced them to either live in boarding houses or rent houses at high costs.
In the dominant government literature and perhaps the view of many segments of society, the economic pressure exerted on underprivileged students and its bitter consequences, such as suicide, are not so prominent. In a sense, the discrimination against students who are forced to work as laborers is only seen when such bitter incidents occur.
Worker suicide
"I have been working in this dilapidated building for eleven years, all with low salaries and many delays, and each tower has to be paid further and further away. In these eleven years, they kept telling us that this tower will be built, the other tower will be built, the sixth tower will be built, and the year will be built. It got worse and worse, not better. We come to work on holidays and they don't give us overtime. We still get the salaries we were getting seven years ago. Our salaries are two million eight hundred thousand tomans, even lower! How can I pay my house expenses, the arrears, and debts with this salary?"
These were part of the last message that Bahram Ebrahimimehr, 31, a married father of a three-year-old child and a driver for the Marvdasht municipality, sent to his colleagues on Telegram shortly before he hanged himself in front of the municipality's CCTV cameras. In part of his message, he wrote that he had been repeatedly threatened with dismissal for protesting against the delay in his salary by the contracting officials in the Marvdasht municipality.
The suicide of Bahram Ebrahimimehr, a driver for the Marvdasht municipality, at work highlights the dimensions of this painful act more than anywhere else, the trampled rights of workers and their protest against the way their employer handles their affairs. In a sense, the way for many workers who are faced with their rights being violated is so closed that ending their lives, even in the same place that has been the worker's "workplace" for years, is the last sign of protest that may cost the protester their life.
Arrears of wages, problems with health insurance, temporary contracts, layoffs, and other issues have been the keywords in the narrative of worker suicides in recent years. All of these issues have exacerbated livelihood problems.
Suicide by the well of wealth
In June 2020, Omran Roshani-Moghaddam, a worker at the Yadavaran oil field in Hoveyzeh County, committed suicide due to financial problems and lack of monthly salary. The worker had hanged himself next to one of the oil wells in the oil field. The bitter story of the suicide of the oil field worker in Hoveyzeh is, in a sense, a clear metaphor for the living conditions of a large group of people and wealth management in Iran. Omran Roshani-Moghaddam's colleagues at the time announced that he had hanged himself due to financial problems and lack of monthly salary. One of Omran Roshani-Moghaddam's colleagues said, "His financial situation had become so bad that he didn't even have money to bring food to work, but the company didn't pay attention to this."
Perhaps one of the most newsworthy suicides among workers occurred in the last month of 2017, when Ali Naqdi, a worker at the Haft Tappeh Agricultural and Industrial Company, threw himself into the “water canal” of the industrial complex due to poverty resulting from unpaid wages. The report on Ali Naqdi’s suicide in Haft Tappeh stated that he had entered the work area hours before committing suicide and told his colleagues that he had been pursuing his demands in vain, saying, “I am tired of this situation and want to commit suicide so that the company officials will think about the demands his colleagues have been making for many years.”
One of Ali Naqdi's colleagues, noting that Mr. Naqdi had about 27 years of experience working at the Haft Tappeh sugarcane complex, said, "We didn't believe Mr. Naqdi would keep his words, but suddenly we came across his body lying in the water in the agricultural canal. Ali was about 50 years old. For years, factory officials have not deposited our retirement expenses into the social security account, despite the government's approval, and we seasonal workers have been left in limbo."
At that time (May 2018), a labor activist and member of the Haft Tappeh Workers' Union said: "In one of the cases of workers' suicide attempts, one of the workers, along with his daughter and son, aged about ten and twelve, set himself and his children on fire in front of the management building. He wanted to set himself and his children on fire with gasoline in front of the management building, but fortunately, the workers were able to prevent him from doing so."
Suicide in silence and darkness
Apart from cases in which workers have attempted suicide at work or in front of the company or office building, many other cases of suicide by fired workers or those under financial pressure due to delayed salary payments have also been reported, in which workers chose a place other than the factory to end their lives.
On Saturday, December 12, 2020, the Telegram channel of the Haft Tappeh Company Workers' Syndicate announced that Reza Al-Kashir, a dismissed worker in the company's greenhouse section, hanged himself in his father's house due to livelihood pressures and economic problems and unfortunately died.
A labor activist wrote in his account of Al-Kathir's life: "Al-Kathir had repeatedly stated that he had disabled brothers and sisters and that he was the breadwinner of the family. However, he had been working at the company for the past month when, by a sudden decision of the factory authorities, he was fired and replaced by another person, and his frequent trips to return to work were unsuccessful."
In the absence of accurate statistics and the silence of many workers' suicide attempts in many regions of Iran, it is difficult to obtain an accurate number of suicides among workers due to livelihood and poverty reasons. However, the number of worker suicides has been prominent in almost all recent years. Cases that have occurred both in government institutions such as municipalities and in private sector factories.
A former Ahvaz Steel worker told the Human Rights Campaign about the reasons for the increase in suicides among workers: "In today's conditions in Iran, losing a job means the end of life. No savings, no support. For many others, the delay in paying salaries has become so unbearable that it is not much different from a worker being unemployed, he is just forced to do the work so that it is not taken away from him."
According to this former worker at the Ahvaz Steel Factory, "Living pressures and widespread poverty among workers have not only led to an increase in the number of suicides, but have also had a great impact on violent behavior in these areas, even leading to cases such as murder or violent fights."
The forms of discrimination against the working class and the underclass, as repeatedly expressed in workers' protests, are among the most important reasons that compel citizens of the working class to end their lives.
These same aspects of discrimination have a direct impact on the increase in suicides among other segments of society and have the same bitter consequences. Not long ago, Mohammad Habibi, the spokesman for the Teachers' Union, announced on Twitter that Mustafa Ranjbaran, the head of the Department of Life in Minab County, had committed suicide due to economic pressure.
Habibi wrote: "These chain suicides among teachers and workers due to livelihood problems and suicides of students, pupils and teenagers due to social pressures are truly a type of state murder and should be a wake-up call for everyone."
The extinction of the symbols of "hope"
Although the government has always tried to show that the main priority of the executive authorities has been to “eliminate discrimination and poverty” of the people, the reality in Iran tells a completely different story. Recently, the 13th Prime Minister, Ebrahim Raisi, said that he would eradicate “absolute poverty” in Iran in just two weeks. According to Ebrahim Raisi’s claim, absolute poverty will no longer exist in Iran by the end of 1400. The Iranian Ministry of Labor announced in October 1400 that one-third of the Iranian population lives in absolute poverty. The unrealistic approach of the authorities, the repetition of general words, and the constant inefficiency in eliminating poverty in Iran are fueling the “despair” of this large segment of society that is forced to live in “absolute poverty.” Disappointment about what they call the “future.”
On the other hand, the prevalence of suicide among segments of society that are, in a sense, examples of the "future" of society, causes the concept of "despair" to appear in a different way in the macro-narrative of society. The suicide of children who are unable to provide the necessities of education or of teachers who show the way to the "future" of children is the most bitter form of the collapse of the meaning of the future and hope among many citizens who see and feel more and more every day the chains of discrimination, inequality, and oppression perpetrated by the government.
Source: Iran Human Rights Campaign
