A variety of issues ranging from narcotics, wars, refugees, and ideologies face the Iran Region. Read a brief overview below or take a deeper look by clicking on the titles.
It is impossible to understand the Iran Region without having some understanding of poppy power. It is funding war, and sentencing at least five million people to an early death. The Church in Asia has had a traditional role of providing good health facilities. This now needs to be expanded to include drug rehabilitation.
Iranian hospitality is world famous, and it is not just polite words. For the last 20 years Iran has looked after the second largest refugee population in the world in a dignified manner, with little help from the international community.
Students have always been the most sensitive section of society, and universities the centre of revolutionary ideas. It was from the universities that Reza Shah (1878 - 1944) first initiated his liberal policies1. The first revolutionary sentiments favouring an Islamic state came from students2, and now more than 20 years later, it is students who are at the forefront of the call for an Islamic democracy.
When the Reform Movement won massive victories in the February 2000 elections to the parliament, there was talk of a Prague Spring in Tehran and the Reform Movement's leader, President Khatami being Iran's Mikhail Gorbachov. Since then no less than 18 liberal' newspapers have been closed, some of the editors jailed for being un-Islamic, and at least one close ally of Khatami, Saeed Hajjarian, has been the victim of an assassination attempt.