Photos emerging of them spark national anger and international concern
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Homeless people outside the region of Kerman in Iran. (getty)[/caption]
Tehran: Fairoza Ramadan Zada
Photographs emerging of homeless people in Iran, scared and disheveled, have sparked unprecedented reactions on social media and foreign media outlets. Yes, those people are homeless, and yes they seek shelter from freezing winter nights in empty graves.
The first media outlet to publish those images was the Shahrvand Newspaper, a publication affiliated with the Iranian Red Crescent Society, along with a report revealing that graveyard of Naseerabad in Baghestan in the countryside of the industrial city of Shahriar, west of Tehran, contains 300 empty tombs. At least 50 homeless people among which are men, women and children, sleep in 20 of them.
Social media rage
It only took a few hours for the report to go viral. Journalists and charities subsequently rushed to the cemetery to follow up the conditions of the dwellers up close, but they did not find them there. It was later revealed that police forces had expelled them out of the cemetery and beaten them.
However, the photographs and Shahrvand’s report left a mark after being circulated.
Asghar Farhadi, the famous Oscar-winning director, wrote a damning open letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the poverty and plight of children, women and men who sleep in cemeteries, ones who are forced to and sleep under trees of public parks and reside under bridges.
“Today, I read the shocking report on the lives of men, women and children who are living inside graves of a cemetery near Tehran,” Farhadi wrote. “Reading it filled me with utter shame “.
Farhadi noted that “The report indicated that a homeless man identified as (Arman,whose name means hope in Persian, is sleeping in a tomb, left outside in cold winter nights and facing death.. Arman is a lost hope that was found inside a tomb.”
In his reply to Farhadi, President Rouhani said: “Who can, in a great country like Iran, accept that some of their fellow countrymen, who have been affected by social harm, take shelter in graves due to helplessness?”
The report further drew attention of foreign media like Reuters, BBC, CBS, eurosnews, Al-Arabiya, arabnews, gulf-times and other prominent news outlets.
Reports and photographs taken by Syed Ghulam Hussain, that were published by CBS revealed that 50 men, women and children, many of which are drug addicts, were sleeping inside empty graves 12 miles west of Tehran.
A pressing issue for 20 years
Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem-Shirazi, a "source of emulation" for many Shia Muslims, said: “Enemies have recently provoked a wide controversy on social networks on the topic of inhabitants of tombs in Iran, while hundreds of thousands of people in the United States itself sleep in cardboard boxes and some of them live in sewers.”
Living in empty graves in Tehran is not a new phenomenon; citizens have been found years ago staying next to graves and tombs of deceased imams in various Iranian cities.
Nima Sarvestani, a Swedish-Iranian filmmaker and documentary filmmaker producer, directed a documentary film in 2001 entitled: “Naked and Wind”. The film includes interviews with a number of young men who slept in tombs containing dead people in a city, downtown Iran.
This issue has been a pressing one for two decades, and Shahrvand’s report just brought it back to the surface. The disaster of living in tombs of the deceased does not only exist in Tehran but also in some other cities across Iran.
Mir Taher, a retired teacher in Tehran, says: “The phenomenon of inhabitants of tombs has been noticed in Zahedan and its outskirts, and the situation is definitely worsening in the countryside of Tehran province in the areas of Ghrara, Varamin, Saveh, Jajrood, and Shahriar.”
Mir noted that” “The middle class is greatly shrinking as most of its members have fell below the poverty line”. He adds “people have no options in terms of housing and the government helps people in only special cases, due to insufficient resources”.
He went to say that” “It is an unsuccessful government; it takes money from people to live as some institutions in Iran like Tehran's municipality, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij have great capital. Such disparity will not be resolved through media.”
He added: “I watched footage today on the residents of the Saveh neighborhood; all of them were barefoot, they had no winter clothes on, and had no water nor electricity… shameful”
Graveyards as destinations of solace
Reza, a student and a blogger residing in the city of Garmsar, said: “We have not witnessed a real phenomenon of grave inhabitation yet.” He clarifies, “Some people who write supplications are actually advised to sleep either a night or a few nights in a grave in order to solve their problems as it is believed that sleeping in graves has a spiritual reward, but the sleeping in graves due to homelessness is a different issue.”
He added that: “Poor people were living in areas near tombs, as they were built in neighborhoods close to cities or towns. They were far from residential districts, so inhabitants of slums use these areas as they want to take advantage of vows made by people for the sake of their deceased. Or if somebody wants to help the poor, he heads to slums near tombs as people live there.”
Ashkan, a student of statistics, said: “When President Hassan Rouhani visited Germany, the Europeans gave him a report on the economic situation in Iran. The report showed that there are three million billionaires in Iran. Thus, this group (billionaires) manages all purchases and sales in local markets. The billionaires will neither buy aircraft (Boeing) nor construct railways or roads, but they control all the country’s vital ports through their enormous wealth which they obtained overnight. The number of women sleeping in cardboard boxes is very noticeable and regrettable.” Such report highlighted the disparity of wealth in Iran and how it affects the well-being of citizens with the lowest income.
A news agency in July, 2015, quoted a deputy president for women affairs that out of the 15,000 people who sleep in cardboard boxes, 5000 of them are women.
Moreover, in an interview with the ministry of planning, head of reconstruction organization of Tehran Municipality Abdullah Fath-ellahi said that there are between 150,000-200,000 people sleeping in cardboard boxes in only one area in Tehran.
Following the publication of the report on inhabitants of graves in Naseerabad, publishing news on the poor in Iran, including dwellers of cardboard boxes, had bigger reactions on many Iranian media outlets than the previous report.
The media published a report on a worker of Tehran Municipality, who lives in the area surrounding the tomb of the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
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A kid playing with dust in the poverty-stricken town of Ghaleh in South West Tehran. (getty)[/caption]
Paradise of Zahara
Saman, a journalist in Tehran and who was banned by the government from writing, said: “Many people have been living in the cemetery of Tehran (Tehran Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery - Paradise of Zahara) for many years. They were eating food, fruits, sweets leftover on graves.”
Saman added: “When Gholamhossein Karbaschi was serving as the mayor of Tehran, I went with a teacher of my school to (Tehran Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery - Paradise of Zahara) and I saw families living in tombs. I remember that drug addicts were resorting to graves in 1992 to protect themselves from cold and to get what they want to eat there”.
“In 2002, I used to go to Khomeini's mausoleum, where dwellers of graves were spread nearby areas. But they were seeking to enter the shrine to avoid being dismissed out of the place”.
“This social problem which has continued over two decades has been topping Shahrvand Newspaper. The problem appeared after doors of mosques had been closed. And then drug addicts and homeless people did not find a place to live in.”
“Money is being spent on many empty mosques. They are the best option to be a shelter for all homeless people in Iran. After the revolution, mosques have transferred into military bases. “
Saman went to say that: “Dealing violently and shamefully with drug addicts has pushed them to resort to graves instead of shelters belonging to municipalities ... shelter centers send addicts to drug addiction treatment institutions that deal very violently with them. A drug addict sometimes dies because of being beaten. Drug addicts have no dignity in these centers. Their families neither follow up the matter in case of the death nor submit a complaint to the concerned institutions in this case. One of my relatives vomited blood in a center of drug addiction treatment, north of the country, a few years ago and died. Therefore, drug addicts refrain from going to these centers.”
Shahrvand Newspaper published on January 7, 2017, a report on 12 families containing one hundred members who have been living in an abandoned concrete building in the middle of Jitaker Park for 40 years. Population staff took some aerial photographs on these people suffering from lack of gas, water and cellular phones.
Some media outlets published a report about a father and his daughter, from Shirvan belonging to North Khorasan province, that have been living in a stockyard of cows for 20 years.
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Iranians walking in the poverty-stricken town of Ghaleh in South West Tehran. (getty)[/caption]
Slogans of the Iranian Revolution
The Iranian Revolution’s slogans are “achieving justice, financial development and prosperity, and eliminating all forms of discrimination”.
“As one of the most important objectives, we have noticed that 18 million people in Iran have been living in inappropriate places and slums close to the city after 38 years of the revolution. This reflects the size of deprivation being experienced by dwellers of poor slums and shanty towns in Iran.”
Speaking on shanty towns in Iran last June, Interior Minister Abdel Reza RahmaniFadli said: “About 600,000 Iranians are sentenced in prison every year, 11 million are living in slums. We at the same time have 3.5 million unemployed people and 1.5 million addicts.”
Official statistics indicate that dwellers are living either in shanty towns in mountainous areas or in valleys.
Other dwellers have to use pieces of cardboard boxes, bags and waste as places to sleep inside them. Some homeless people live in brick kilns, mats houses and rooms, which are all examples of shanty towns spreading in most cities in Iran.
Slums are broadening greatly in the city of Mashhad which is located near the tomb of Ali ibn Musa Al-Ridha, the eighth Imam of the Shia. Astan Quds Razavi foundation, which is the fourth major economic institution in Iran, is supervising the shrine.
The city’s population is 2.7 million, more than 900, 000 of them are living in the slum areas. Drug addiction, theft, sexual exploitation and unemployment are increasing in this city. These problems are the most important challenges facing the Razavi Khorasan Province.
Mahnaz, a worker live in Mashhad, says: “The number of homeless people and addicts increase every year with the onset of cold, rain and snow in cemeteries and abandoned houses in the city of Sabzevar located in Razavi Khorasan Province, for drug use freely without being observed by police.”
There are aggravated social problems, like the spread of slums, poverty, income inequality, sexual discrimination, and bad services of education and health in Iran, at a time when the Republic has vowed to achieve the global benchmark of sustainable development by 2030.
