Ten very surprising things about Iran

October 31st, 2005 at 09:20 Björn Hallberg

Sometimes you need a reality based story to counter the propaganda being unwittingly peddled by many of the corporate and government players. It turns out that Iran has a few tweaks of liberty and democracy that even most western nation states cannot claim.

Independent via Boing Boing - (3) More than 3,600 Iranians have been killed in the past 25 years fighting heroin smugglers, whose main trade route to the West passes through the Islamic republic. Iran itself has a major drug problem, with more than two million addicts. The government has permitted radical measures to tackle the problem, including methadone programmes and syringe hand-outs to prevent the spread of disease.

(5) According to the UNHCR, Iran hosts more than one million foreign refugees - more than any other country on earth. Most of these are Afghans and Iraqi Kurds, who fled their countries during the 1980s and ’90s. Iran has in the past spent millions providing them with social security but in return it has acquired a huge workforce prepared to do manual labour for rock-bottom wages.

Also, there is a somewhat more balanced use of the fatwa prerogative in there that I doubt most people have been introduced to.

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