In Iran, clerics' wealth draws ire

Two years ago, Hossein Yazdi was looking forward to a quiet retirement. Now he's back at work as one of Tehran's countless unofficial taxi drivers, trying to supplement a monthly pension of $65.

"[Two pounds] of meat costs $5 these days; most weeks my wife and I go without," he says. "If things carry on like this, people like us will soon be dying of starvation."

Daily conversation here turns with alarming speed to the daily struggle to make ends meet. But what makes such talk baffling is that most economists consider the country to be relatively well managed.

"Iran has huge resources of oil and gas, and the rise in oil prices since 1999 from $10 a barrel to over $26 today has given the economy an immense boost," says Yves Cadilhon, head of the French economic mission in Tehran.

So what are many Iranians complaining about? A powerful group of clerics and merchants who, critics say, have a stranglehold on the economy.

For Saeed Laylaz, an assistant manager at Iran's largest car manufacturer and a supporter of moderate President Muhammad Khatami, the gripes are an effect of political reforms. "People are no longer afraid to speak out: they're not getting angrier, just more vocal," he says.

Jahangir Amuzegar, who was Iran's finance minister in the 1970s, disagrees. "It's the envy factor," he says. "I doubt anybody is getting poorer, but the trouble is that a tiny minority is getting richer very quickly."

That is a bitter pill to swallow given that "covenant of the meek," or social justice, was a favorite catchphrase of the leaders of Iran's 1979 revolution. But it's made far worse by the fact that the principal beneficiaries of wealth redistribution have been the regime clerics and their closest allies.

Among the main bastions of clerical control are the bonyad, immense foundations built up after 1979 from wealth confiscated from Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Iran's last shah. Ostensibly "charitable" organizations, they frequently use their wealth - up to 35 percent of the economy, according to analysts - for questionable purposes. In 1997, for instance, one senior cleric and bonyad boss announced his institution was offering $2.5 million for the assassination of novelist Salman Rushdie.

Another bonyad based in the holy city of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, has used donations from as many as 8 million pilgrims a year to buy up 90 percent of the arable land in the surrounding region. Controlled since 1979 by arch-conservative Ayatollah Abbas Vaez-Tabazi - whose son and daughter are married to two of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's children - the foundation also owns universities and a Coca-Cola factory.

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