| |
Iran feels the squeeze,
again
By Safa Haeri
PARIS -
The Islamic Republic of Iran has opted for a path of
confrontation with the United Kingdom and Argentina
after the arrest by Scotland Yard last Friday of a
former Iranian ambassador to Buenos Aires, acting on an
international warrant issued by an Argentine judge. The
judge accused the envoy of participation in the July
1994 bombing of AMIA (Asociacion Mutual Israelita
Argentina), the Jewish center, in the Argentine capital,
which killed more than 80 people and wounding 300
others.
Hadi Soleymanpour, 47, was arrested last
Thursday evening at his flat in Durham, northern
England, where he is a research student at the city's
university. A court in London, where he appeared the
following day, decided to keep him in jail pending
further study of the case, also waiting to receive more
details from Judge Juan Jose Galeano. Soleymanpour is
accused of conspiracy to murder by providing the
terrorists who undertook the bombing with diplomatic
facilities.
Galeano issued an international
warrant 10 days ago against eight Iranian officials,
including Soleymanpour, but also Hojjatoeslam Ali
Fallahian, the intelligence minister at the time of the
explosion, and Hojjatoleslam Mohsen Rabbani, the
cultural attache at the embassy in Buenos Aires.
Iran immediately rejected the charges,
describing the accusation as "politically motivated" and
made under pressure from "Zionist circles" in Argentina
and Israel. Not only is Soleymanpour the first of the
eight men to be arrested, he is also the first
high-ranking Iranian diplomat to be placed behind bars
for alleged terrorist activities.
The former
intelligence minister, who is now a top adviser to
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic
Republic, was already under an international warrant
delivered by German authorities for his alleged role in
the assassination of four Kurdish leaders of Iranian
origin in Berlin in September 1992.
Iranian
President Mohammed Khatami, abandoned by many former
supporters for his inability to push through any
meaningful reform and looking to recover his tarnished
popularity, promised on Sunday that Tehran would take
"tough action" against both London and Buenos Aires for
the arrest of Soleymanpour.
Khatami described
the detention of the former ambassador by Scotland Yard
as a "tactless" measure and warned that Iran intends "to
respond in the most serious and resolute way" to such
action, but he stopped short of being more precise in
his threats.
Khatami expressed hope that the
British cabinet would settle the problem in the shortest
possible period and would "apologize to Tehran for the
actions of its police", the official news agency IRNA
said. It added that the president had described the
arrest of Soleymanpour as a "political decision"
provoked by lobbies that are hostile to Iran and are
creating international pressures on it, a veiled
reference to Israel and the influential Jewish lobbies
in Argentina, home of more than a million Jews, but also
some 4 million Arabs.
"We had met such
situations in the past and have stood up to them. So we
have experience in how to deal with them. The British
government's behavior is regrettable and unacceptable,
and Iran will not practice tolerance in this regard,"
Khatami was further quoted by the Independent Students
News Agency (ISNA) as saying.
On Saturday, the
Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry summoned the British
and Argentine charges d'affaires in Tehran, calling on
the United Kingdom for the "immediate release" of
Soleymanpour and warning it "not to enter" games to
which it is not a party. As for Buenos Aires, it warned
that Iran would not let the arrest of Soleymanpour go
without grave consequences for Argentina.
The
official at the ministry also told the Argentine charge
that Iran, a major importer of meat, wheat and other
cereals from cash-hungry Argentina, would cut all
economic and cultural ties because of the terrorist
charges, which had been abandoned under the presidency
of Carlos Menem, who is of Syrian origin.
Menem
was afterward suspected by the press of having received
large sums from the former Iranian president, Ayatollah
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, for shelving the AMIA
case, reopened by President Nestor Kirshner when he took
over the job on February 25 this year, pledging not to
let terrorists go with impunity.
Argentine
Foreign Affairs Minister Carlos Ruckhauf, for his part,
summoned Iranian charge d'affaires Mohammed Ali
Tabataba'i, explaining that the Argentine government was
not involved in the arrest request, a case, he said,
that was being investigated by a judge and not the
government. "We hope that Iran understands that," he
told the Iranian diplomat.
As it is understood
that the Argentine authorities made a formal request to
the British side for the extradition to Buenos Aires of
the accused diplomat, UK diplomatic sources said British
Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who has visited Iran four
times, and his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi, had
been in regular contact about the case.
The
source said the UK hoped the case would not damage the
normalization process built up between the two countries
after years of tension and mutual suspicions. Hamshahri,
a newspaper published by the Tehran municipality, warned
in a commentary that by arresting the Iranian diplomat,
London might lose the position it wanted to occupy as a
privileged and trusted party between Iran and the
international community, particularly in regard with the
"great United States Satan".
In a telephone
conversation with his British counterpart from Beijing,
where he was on an official visit, Kharrazi warned that
keeping Soleymanpour in prison would "undoubtedly"
affect diplomatic relations between London and Tehran.
Mas'oud Behnood, a veteran Iranian journalist
who lives in London, says the new crisis in Iran's
relations with Britain and Argentine also has
ramifications inside the clerical leadership, adding
more strains on the ongoing feud between the ruling
conservatives and the reformers.
In fact, while
the press controlled by the conservatives, such as the
daily Keyhan, one of the mouthpieces of Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, calls on the authorities to be harder with
London by expelling the British ambassador from Tehran,
the pro-reform newspapers on the other hand insist that
the arrest of Soleymanpour shows that the policy of the
hardliners in seeking detente with the outside world
coupled with crackdowns inside the country has failed.
Iranian and British judicial experts and lawyers
say the Soleymanpour case may last a year before London
decides whether to extradite him to Argentina or deport
him to Tehran, in case he does not ask for political
asylum in the UK.
They also told Asia Times
Online that another possibility for London to settle the
row with Tehran is for the Iranian side to "prove" that
the accused enjoys diplomatic immunity, and for British
justice to accept that, regardless of the fact that
Soleymanpour entered the UK with his wife and two
children on a student visa in February 2002 and that he
was covered by diplomatic immunity only for the time
that he served as ambassador in Argentina.
It is
not known why Soleymanpour did not leave Britain
immediately after Judge Galeano issued the arrest order,
or whether the Iranian authorities ordered him to come
back to Iran. The question has prompted some Iranians to
give some credit to an article in a Buenos Aires
newspaper speculating that considering the worsening
political situation back home, Soleymanpour might have
secretly joined ranks with Iranian dissidents abroad and
is now seeking political asylum from a European
government.
"After accusations that the Islamic
Republic is building a nuclear arsenal, that it helps
[maintain] unrest in neighboring Iraq and supports
Palestinian groups opposed to peace with Israel, this is
the fourth and new pressure applied on Tehran by the
international community," Bahnood commented.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
