But in an interview published on 12 December by "Baztab", an internet newspaper owned by Mr. Mohsen Reza’i, the Secretary of the Assembly for Discerning the State’s Interests (ADIS, or the Expediency council that is chaired by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the regime’s virtual number two man), Mr. Ali Mohammad Namazi, a representative of the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF) in the Majles said that "Iran is on the brink of an actual social breakdown".

"One only has to look at the daily newspapers to detect several alarming trends: a continuous, disturbing rise in the number of men and women engaged in prostitution, a significant increase in the number of hard drug addicts, thousands of youngsters running away from their parents homes due to financial and social difficulties, an increase in the number of children living on the streets, an increase in the number of civilians imprisoned for taking part in all sorts of illegal activities and so on and so forth", he pointed out.

Calling upon the leaders of the Islamic Republic "to take heed and to give some serious consideration to these ominous figures that "herald a social breakdown that has already started taking its toll on the country", he cited some news items that actually have become landmarks of Mr. Khamenh’i’s regime and society.

According to Mr. Eshaq Jahangiri, the Iranian Minister of Industry and Mines, Iran’s share of the global trade is less than 0.5 percent. "Only 10 percent of all Iranian exports were industrial products, whereas industrial products usually account for 70 percent of the exports in Far East countries", the daily Entekhab (Choice), quoted him as having stated.

Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Safdar Hoseyni alerted that the number of unemployed young Iranians, university graduates in particular, could reach as high as 5.6 million.

But as Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami, the powerless President of Iran expressed satisfaction at the number of people employed, independent analysts put the number of unemployed as something over or under ten million, one of the highest rate among third world nations.

According to Mr. Hoseyni, the current figure crossed the 3-million mark and therefore issued a call to recruit all Iran’s resources and all organizations operating under the Islamic regime to stand against the tangible threats emanating from the daily increase in the unemployment rate.

The minister stressed that one out of every three Iranians is aged 22-29, an age group that is considered to be seeking job opportunities. According to the minister, the annual growth rate must reach 8.6 percent to prevent an additional rise in the unemployment rate.

Scientific study reveals that the number of unemployed men without post-secondary education is increasing year by year as a consequence of the significant rise in the number of women who get ahead of men and enroll to universities. The study, published by Iran daily, is based upon figures indicating that it is the third year in a row that over 57 percent of the students in Iranian universities are women. It alerts to the implications of women being more educated than men, who are forced to stay at home.

Thousands of workers in the petrochemical complex in Arak province continue hunger strike in protest of the ongoing measures to hand over the plants, which previously belonged to the National Petroleum Company, to the private sector. More than a thousand workers in the tractor manufacturing plants in the city of Tabriz continue their strikes and protests over the fact that their salaries have not been paid in the last several months.

Three more factories in the province of Mazandaran were closed down; over

Five hundred workers were fired as a result. These three factories, including the Harir Ghaim-Shahr textile factory, operated under Iran’s Bank of Industry and Mines.

The factories, which, until now, were among the region’s only profitable ones, went bankrupt as a result of the privatization process and the unsuccessful management. The workers representative in the province of Mazandaran told the independent Iranian Labour News Agency ILNA that in recent years, thousands of workers in the textile industry were living under appalling conditions and were afraid of being fired and sent home without any compensation whatsoever.

Farmers in the Caspian Sea region are disgruntled over the fact that the government has not paid its debts for rice it purchased from the farmers. They claim that their situation has never been direr and that they had no choice but to sell the rice to the government at exceptionally low prices.

A parliament representative from the city of Ilam says, "the real reason for the spread of crime and corruption, -- two other productions of Ayatollah Khameneh'i’s "model nation" -- is the difficult economic situation that plagues the families".

"There is no point in the government concealing the actual data on crime, prostitution and drug addiction", says Mohammad Kianfar, a Majles deputy from the city of Ardabil, stressing that the Iranian Radio and Television, controlled directly by Mr. Khameneh'i, does not provide an accurate reflection of Iranian society.

"As a result of the surging unemployment rate, the lack of hope and the ever-growing social inequality, there has been a real increase in the number of women and even men engaged in prostitution to support their families", he told ILNA.

Head of Iran’s Welfare Organization, Mohammad Reza Rah-Chamani (formerly, a member of the Majles associated with the conservatives), has vehemently denied the "overestimated figures published in Iranian newspapers about a significant increase in the number of citizens engaged in prostitution for living".

He said that "the recently published figure of 600 thousand women in Tehran alone engaged in prostitution to support their families is something from the realm of fantasy and not consistent with reality at all".

But he admitted that, based on recent information published in Tehran’s newspapers, the number of children living on the streets has exceeded the 2 million mark.

86.7 percent of those suffering from various forms of lung diseases in the province of Esfahan suffer from malnutrition as well, resulting in prolonged recovery periods. Most of the ill are women and children from the families of the labourers and the unemployed, a recent research proved.

Head of the medical research centre in the University of Tehran says that the death rate from cancer has recently surged upward and that cancer (gastric cancer in particular) has become the third leading cause of death in Iran in recent years.

"This stems mostly from inadequate nutrition and severe mental stress exerted upon the citizens. 35 thousand Iranian citizens die of cancer each year", he told the official news agency IRNA last December.

Dr. Mahbubeh Haj Abdolbaghi, one of the senior doctors in the Imam Khomeini Hospital, claims that the true number of HIV carriers in Iran is between 30 to 40 thousand people. She added that over 5700 people would die of the disease in the near future and issued a call to "set aside the shame" and "provide students in schools, universities and other educational institutions with information on AIDS.

During the last eight months, an additional 131 tons of hard drugs have been uncovered and confiscated, and tens of thousands were arrested on charges of drug smuggling. These figures indicate an increase of 43 percent compared to last year. According to the data, 72,921 civilians have been arrested on charges of drug smuggling during the last eight months and more than 175 thousand drug addicts have been arrested during the same period (Entekhab, December 6, 2003).

In a single area in Tehran’s suburbs called Khak-e Sefid, hard drug users consume more than 1000lbs of heroin and opium daily. A senior sociologist in the University of Tehran who made a reference to this figure added that in addition to the extreme daily use of hard drugs in that suburb of Tehran, that dangerous area is a "feast of prostitution" that even the police forces do not dare to approach.

Every day, thousands of young women in Tehran undergo illegal abortions in order to terminate pregnancies conceived as a result of illegal sexual intercourse.

Consequently, the number of clinics practicing the forbidden craft of abortions has increased. In quite a few cases, the young women die as a result of lack of proper medical care after the abortion, the moderate "Shargh" newspaper indicated.

A substantial number of infants were born to political prisoners who conceived as a result of rape by jail wardens. Dozens of former political prisoners described these experiences in painful detail after being set free. A substantial number of books and numerous testimonies on this phenomenon have been gathered in recent years.

"This serious shortage results in the students being forced to study in crammed classrooms for shorter periods of time, a situation that only serves to further decrease the level education", IRNA reported

The lack of space in classrooms in hundreds of schools in Tehran’s southern suburbs forces students in elementary, junior high and high schools to stand during the entire study period since neither the benches nor the floor have any room left for the students to sit. Many teachers complain about the fact that the intolerably crowded conditions contribute to chronic fatigue and to the spread of contagious diseases among students.

"The students are uncomfortable to ask leave to go to the bathroom since going out of the classroom forces dozens of other students to move from the place where they stand or sit on the floor", he added.