TEHRAN — This week’s prospect of additional economic sanctions against Iran brings new worries for Mustafa Ibrahim, 52.
Existing sanctions have had a visible effect on Mr. Ibrahim’s printing business. It is already cumbersome doing business directly with European manufacturers and dealers of printing plates, forcing him to drain resources by operating through middlemen in the Arab emirate of Dubai. Profits have shrunk by nearly half, and Mr. Ibrahim now is considering using cheaper Chinese imports, which might diminish his product quality.
The five U.N. Security Council members Tuesday agreed to a resolution to expand U.N. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, which might cause further problems, Mr. Ibrahim worries.
“These days, doing business with any country other than China and Russia is nearly impossible,” he said.
“In this long-smoldering fight with America, the Iranian government, as always, will remain unaffected by sanctions; common people like me will suffer.”
Momentum for a third resolution diminished in light of a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s past nuclear behavior stating Tehran had stopped its covert pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003. Iran is now enriching uranium, insisting it is only for civilian purposes, but the West accuses Tehran of intending to use it for an arms program.
Tehran said sanctions will not force it to halt uranium enrichment.
“Adoption of a possible new resolution will not have any effect on our people,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Gholam Hossein Elham, said Tuesday.
On streets and in shops here, though, the previous sanctions have had a visible effect. Prices of foreign consumer and electronic goods have gone up by half in the last six months.
“The entire approach toward Iran by quarantining it, sanctioning it and isolating it is counterproductive,” said Nader Hashemi of the University of Toronto. “It will only hurt the Iranian people and strengthen the most authoritarian elements within the regime, who benefit from confrontation with the West.”
Some observers say the Iranian regime will withstand any sanctions short of an international ban on the purchase of Iranian oil and natural gas. Iran is the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter, though its economy is largely stagnant — facing chronic unemployment estimated at up to 20 percent and an official inflation rate of 19 percent.
Although sanctions don’t create concrete restrictions per se, they do deter foreign investors. Many international firms are wary of doing business with Iran from fear they will attract attention from the U.S. Treasury Department, which has begun aggressively targeting companies with ties to both the United States and Iran.
“The more internationally isolated Iran becomes, the more its economic woes will exacerbate,” said a senior official from Petro Pars, the state-owned oil company in Tehran, requesting anonymity.
“Look at the economy. There’s almost no foreign investment because we are a pariah state. That ought to change.”
U.S. officials say those sanctions are meant to hit Iran’s leadership without hurting common Iranians, but that might not be the case.
Shahriar Khateri, director of Tehran’s Chemical Warfare Victims Research Unit, who works with Iranian Kurds gassed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1987, recalls how a medical research effort with the British New Castle University was suspended last year soon after the first wave of sanctions.
• This article was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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