US sanctions stomp on Persian carpets (with a silver lining for some)

[ensho]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LJ20Ak02.html


Iran's famed rug industry faces a serious threat from the latest sanctions imposed by the United States, the biggest market for Persian carpets.

The embargo came into force on September 29, coinciding with the final day of a week-long international carpet exhibition in Tehran at which insiders mulled the future of the trade.

(I'd like to see an intl. carpet exhibition. maybe they did a video)

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Levey said the latest sanctions specifically targeted those doing business with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, but it was hard to see how this applied to carpet-weaving.

Around 2 million jobs in Iran are in some way connected to the production and trading of handmade rugs. Adding their dependents, this translates into one in 10 of Iran's population. It is still too early to estimate what impact the loss of the US market will have on the livelihoods of so many people, but many Iranians are understandably beginning to ask why they should lose out so badly if the sanctions are meant to be against their government.

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Persian carpet exports to the US were banned for most of the 1980s and all of the 1990s - with very limited success, according to a veteran merchant in the San Francisco Bay area.

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the silver lining for some:

"The immediate result was a glut on the US market, and even now there are large stocks of unsold Iranian rugs sitting in warehouses across America."