The smoggiest of all capitals

Smothered in a cloud doubtless created by the CIA

TRAVELLERS flying into Tehran were recently denied their usual view of the sprawling metropolis and its majestic mountain backdrop. Instead they found themselves staring into a thick brown haze. Somewhere down in the murk a lot of old people and asthmatics were dying.

Shielded from the cleansing winds by the Alborz massif, teeming with cars and encircled by cement factories and power stations, Tehran has long been notorious for pollution, particularly during dry winters of still air such as this year's. But air quality has recently been worse, for longer, than ever before. A Tehran city councillor recently claimed for his capital nothing less than a “new world record” in air pollution.

A leaked statistic from the health ministry said that 3,600 people had died from air pollution in Tehran in the first nine months of the year. At the peak of the latest crisis, hospital admissions were said to have risen by at least a third and the corridors of local clinics were full of wheezing old people and pregnant women waiting for oxygen.

For a while, the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave an impression of concern. Schools were closed and the number of cars permitted to move around the city cut by half, while crop sprayers soared over the city centre in an effort to thin the aerial mush. Inspectors duly detected a slight improvement in air quality, but complaints from shopkeepers and bazaar traders soon became too loud to ignore, and the car restrictions were lifted. Three days later, on December 18th, public attention was distracted by Mr Ahmadinejad's controversial subsidy reforms, which have sent the price of petrol and bread rocketing and brought the police onto the streets in case of disturbances.

The authorities insist they are determined to reduce the capital's pollution. “This”, retorts a Tehrani, “is what they say every winter, and nothing gets done.” For a city serving 13m people, public transport is inadequate and the government twitchy about anything smacking of civil society. As a result, the country has so far had no effective green movement (as opposed to the opposition Green Movement, led by Mir Hosein Mousavi, who is widely believed to have defeated Mr Ahmadinejad in the presidential election of June 2009).

Official attitudes to cars are contradictory. On the one hand, Tehranis are encouraged to use the capital's small and overloaded underground railway. On the other, the government, with its big stake in the car industry, relentlessly promotes car sales, even in Tehran, which already has 3.5m of them.

Ettelaat, a newspaper close to the establishment, recently suggested that the poor quality of Iranian-made petrol may explain the recent increase in pollution. That was a gaffe, for Iran's declared self-sufficiency in petrol production has also been trumpeted as a source of national pride, which would be pricked if it were blamed for the deaths of hundreds of citizens. The next day, Ettelaat was contrite. “The great success of the sons of the people in producing high-quality petrol” ran its headline, over a picture of an Iranian refinery purring away under a flawless blue sky.