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Dangerous But Popular

Ahmadinejad Buys His Way Into Iranians' Hearts

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains popular among Iranians, despite increasing Western pressure. Free hospital treatment and low-interest consumer loans play a part.

It is just before the start of Norooz, the Iranian new year festival, and droves of vacationing Iranians are driving through the desert between Kashan and Isfahan, 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of Tehran. The blue sky above the desert makes it look like spring has arrived -- but along the northern edge of the Karkas Mountains, storms are driving heavy clouds onto the plains below.

It's late in the afternoon and a perfect rainbow has formed between the new Persian Gulf Highway and the nuclear facility at Natanz. At the "Speedy" gas station, just a few hundred meters from the first line of anti-aircraft gun emplacements protecting the plant, travelers climb out of their cars to snap a picture.

Suddenly one man barks at the man standing next to him: "Military police! Put away the camera!" But then he places his hand on the man's shoulder and smiles; the two are still relaxed enough to joke about their own carelessness.

A group of Revolutionary Guards is visible in the distance, doing calisthenics to fight off the cold. Even they pause for a moment to admire the rainbow.

To the left lies the new six-lane highway that will one day extend from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf -- a prestige project for the Islamic Republic. Iranians, who enjoy traveling and going on pilgrimages, can appreciate how the oil boom is gradually benefiting their country's infrastructure. They are proud of their well-kept cities, Tehran's new, modern Imam Khomeini International Airport, the subways being built in Shiraz, Mashhad and Isfahan and the gas refinery at Assaluyeh, the largest of its kind in the world.

To the right, however, lies a series of sinister-looking grey buildings surrounded by shrapnel protection walls und anti-aircraft positions, the visible portion of the Natanz nuclear facility (the rest is buried in the foothills of the Karkas Mountains). For the travelers at the "Speedy" rest stop, Natanz is just as eerie as it is to the West. "I get shivers just looking at it," says a bus driver from Isfahan. "We have no idea what exactly they are doing down there."

Last week the United Nations Security Council approved its second package of sanctions against Iran. If Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment, at least temporarily, the country could face further trade restrictions and its leaders could find their foreign bank accounts blocked and their travel abroad restricted. In any case, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cancelled his appearance before the UN on Friday, citing problems obtaining a visa. Some Iranians had already suspected that the planned UN appearance was nothing but a veiled attempt to give the Iranian president another "opportunity to embarrass us."

Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei had only recently issued a clear warning to the West. If the world's major powers use the Security Council to strike at Iran, said Khamenei, they will be acting "against the law," adding "then we too can act outside the law -- and we will do so." And if Iran is threatened militarily, he continued, it would use all its resources to respond to threats and the use of force by its enemies. Almost preemptively, the Iranian navy detained 15 members of the crew of the British frigate <I>HMS Cornwall</I> on Friday. In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki seemed to set the tone of the debate: "We hate war. But we also view resistance as our obligation."

Is this true? Are the country's people and its leaders truly united in the face of a threat from abroad? How do the Iranians perceive their country's emergence as the dominant regional power in the Gulf -- and its simultaneous isolation by the countries of the West? Are sanctions an appropriate means of upping internal pressure on the radicals, or do they ultimately force even moderates to close ranks with the rest of the nation? Views on these issues vary widely in the Iranian provinces.

Sitting and waiting

"Yesterday the British UN ambassador claimed that the embargo would only affect the leadership. Does he really believe that?" says a 42-year-old businessman in Isfahan who sells high-tech Western medical products, including so-called intraocular lens implants, to eye clinics in southern Iran. Because his British suppliers are barred from exported directly to Iran, the products are shipped to Iran through an intermediary in Dubai. "I pay almost twice the world market price for these lenses," says the Iranian. "That's too expensive for most patients here. They choose not to have their eye operation, preferring to live with glaucoma instead."

A cloud of political uncertainty hangs over Iran's bazaars. "My customers are sitting on their money, and I'm sitting on mine," says a carpet merchant in Shiraz. "No one really wants to invest in anything at the moment. Those who can afford it are even withholding salaries. It's depressing."

Is the anger of the influential bazaar merchants aimed at the West or the government in Tehran, which seems intent on bringing the conflict to a head? "It is far more complicated that the West imagines," says the owner of a Tehran computer company who is visiting relatives in the central Iranian city of Yazd.

Ahmadinejad himself was in Yazd two weeks ago, accompanied by half the government. All roads to the airport were blocked off and the city's officials were bussed to the soccer stadium for the president's speech.

But hardly any bazaar merchants, says the computer salesman, bothered to show up. "We already know what he always promises at these appearances: a new road construction project here, a new youth center there. The man is throwing our money out the window and driving up inflation."

A popular hero

But his employees' opinions about the president, says the computer entrepreneur, are at least equally important -- and their view is quite different. One employee, who has been with the company for 20 years, bought a used car and a condominium last year. He would never have been able to afford these things before -- until Ahmadinejad cut the interest rates for consumer loans almost in half. "For this man, the president is a hero." And if he is behind in his payments today, says the company's owner, the employee blames the West, not Ahmadinejad.

"Or take my mother, for example," says the computer businessman. Like many women of her generation, his mother, now in her 70s, mourned the loss of the Shah after he was toppled in 1979. When the elderly woman recently suffered a femoral neck fracture, she was taken to the nearest hospital, which happened to be private. Everyone in the family quickly scraped together their cash to pay the notorious down payment Iranian private hospitals demand before accepting patients. But then, to their surprise, they were told that the down payment was unnecessary. The president, said hospital officials, had ordered urgent cases to be treated right away.

"That may well change again," says the son, "but at the moment you won't hear my mother say a bad word about Ahmadinejad."

Many Iranians believe it is unrealistic to expect the regime to be brought to its knees by political or economic pressure. "We've been through worse times in the past," says an employee at the Ghawam Restaurant in the port city of Bushehr, the site of Iran's nuclear reactor, which has been under construction for more than 30 years but is still unfinished. Iraqi jets bombarded Bushehr during the Iran-Iraq war. Nowadays, when the wind blows from the West, fishermen off the coast often hear the fighter jets that are based on nearby American aircraft carriers.

A Western travel guide describes Bushehr as a mixture of a museum city and the Chechen city of Grozny after the third Russian war. But the man from the restaurant disagrees, saying "life in Bushehr has constantly improved in recent years." Generations of residents suffered from the city's disastrous water supply, even under the Shah. But today, says the restaurant employee, every family has fresh drinking water, which means a lot to local residents.

What is less interesting to the people at the bazaar in Bushehr, as they make their last-minute purchases for the Norooz festival, is that there is a facility only 10 kilometers (6 miles) outside the city, hidden behind barbed wire fences and machine gun nests. The plant has generated international headlines for years, most recently after the Russians decided to refuse to supply the nuclear fuel for it which they had previously promised.

But what does have the locals worked up, just like their fellow Iranians in Kashan, Isfahan and Yazd, is a Hollywood movie that opened in the United States a few weeks ago. The first pirated copies of the film are already being eagerly awaited in Iran.

The historical epic is called "300," and it's about the battle between the Spartans and the army of the Persian king, Xerxes I, at Thermopylae. And although hardly anyone in Iran has seen the movie, it dominates the current agenda in an odd reflection of today's political situation.

"Hollywood Declares War on Iranians," read a front-page headline in the daily newspaper Ayande-no -- a paper that supports the country's opposition reformers, no less. The film, writes Ayande-no, creates the impression that "Iran has been a source of evil for a long time, and that the ancestors of modern Iranians are precisely those ugly, murderous and mindless wild men portrayed in the film '300.'"

A cultural advisor to Ahmadinejad agrees, and even claims that the film represents an act of "psychological warfare against Iran." "The American cultural officials," says the advisor, "apparently thought they could derive intellectual satisfaction from plundering Iran's history and insulting its civilization."

"That's funny, but not true," says an elderly man who -- together with female students from Tehran, mullahs from Ghom, businesspeople and scholars -- is celebrating the new year by making a pilgrimage to the grave of Iran's national poet, Hafez, in Shiraz. "If the threat comes from outside, we suddenly all agree."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan