Salman Rusdie, despite an Islamic "fatwa" demanding the novelist’s death issued by the country’s late Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s ambassador said in an interview published Sunday, July 17. However the Iranian ambassador to Thailand, Mohsen Pakaein, made clear this does not mean his government will accept Western pressure for changes in other areas, including human rights and its controversial nuclear program.
He told BosNewsLife’s Bangkok Bureau that American President George Bush is "interfering" in Iran by demanding the release of Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji from prison. Asked about Tehran’s plans to enrich uranium, Pakaein, said: "Now we are waiting for the negotiations with the Europeans, because we see the negotiations are going on, and everything depends on these negotiations. We will announce our policy after finalizing our negotiations with the Europeans."
London, Paris and Berlin are pushing Tehran to continue its temporary ban on the enrichment of uranium. Despite Iran’s insistence that its low-level enrichment was to produce only "peaceful" energy so Iran could modernize, enriched uranium can also be used to build nuclear weapons.
"PEACEFUL PROGRAM"
"Obviously, Iran’s peaceful nuclear program is no threat to any country in the world. But the Zionist regime [Israel] is a center of depot and production of nuclear and mass destruction weapons in the Middle East, and is the most serious threat to the peace and stability in the region," Pakaein said.
Meanwhile last week President Bush called for Iran to release Ganji, an Iranian journalist who was locked up in 2000 for reporting an alleged connection between Intelligence Ministry officials and the 1998 murder of five dissidents. "I think this kind of a declaration [by Bush] is interfering in our internal affairs, because the fate of any prisoners in Iran is related to the Iranians, and nobody from the other countries can talk about them," Ambassador Pakaein said in the interview.
Relations between Bush and Iran’s President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who won a surprise landslide victory in last month’s election — can be friendly if Washington ends "its hostility," the ambassador said.
US HOSTILITY
"The number one block is the hostility of the US against us. If the United States finishes their hostility against Iran, our policy is to have good relations with all countries," he explained.
"With all [US] presidents, we always mention that if we see some positive activity from the United States’ side, we are ready to consider it positively, but for us there is no difference between the [recent US] presidents. So, anytime we see some positive position from them, maybe our position will be positive," Pakaein said.
Iran’s 1979 seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran, and the holding of its staff as hostages, exposed America’s sinister motives, he said. "We cannot say that the place was the embassy, because we had some documents [showing] that there was some spy system" operating within the building, he said.
MANY DOCUMENTS
The ambassador was referring to thousands of American embassy, State Department and Central Intelligence Agency cables, and other "confidential" documents, which were reportedly shredded by panicky American embassy staff but painstakingly pieced together by Iranians and published in 69 books titled "Documents from the US Espionage Den."
They include communications between American embassies in Tehran, Kabul, Islamabad, New Delhi, Jeddah, London, Moscow, Paris, NATO, Washington and elsewhere, and named diplomats, journalists, Iranian officials, dissidents and others who discussed official, personal and private issues with US embassy staff.
Asked if Iran’s new government would request Muslims to fulfill a deadly fatwa issued by the country’s late ayatollah against author Rushdie — who allegedly blasphemed Islam in a novel titled "The Satanic Verses" — Pakaein replied: "No, it is not the policy of the government to encourage anybody, and I don’t think that the policy of the new government is that." The fatwa, however, is apparently a sensitive subject.
FATWA PAST?
"I think, about the fatwa, it is better I do not say anything, because it is something of the past." Several human rights groups have expressed concern however about what they say is the growing influence of Iran’s religious police and actions against Christians, several of whom are still prison. They include Hamid Pourmand, a former army colonel, who was also serving as lay pastor for an Assemblies of God congregation in the southern port city of Bandar-i Bushehr.
After five months of interrogation in what church sources called "strict solitary confinement," Pourmand was arraigned in February before a military court, accused of "deceiving the Iranian armed forces" by not reporting his conversion to Christianity.
Despite "clear-cut evidence to the contrary," he was ruled guilty, dishonorably discharged and handed down the maximum three-year prison sentence for his ‘crime,’ church sources said. An Islamic court spared his life earlier this year amid international and domestic pressure. (Copyright 2005 Richard S. Ehrlich. Award-winning reporter, photojournalist and author Richard S. Ehrlich has covered the world’s hotspots and Asia for 27 years for a variety of media, including as a Staff Correspondent for United Press International from 1978 to 1984, based in Hong Kong and New Delhi. He also co-authored the non-fiction best seller "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" — Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews. The book, reviewed by Time magazine and other leading publications, looks beyond the red light of Thailand’s nightlife, and gives a rare insight in the often tragic and difficult relationships between prostitutes and their clients. Ehrlich, who was born in the US and is currently based in Bangkok, received the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Foreign Correspondent’s Award in 1978. He speaks some Mandarin, Hindustani, Urdu, Thai, Spanish and French. Ehrlich can be reached for assignments and/or more information via website: http://www.geocities.com/glossograph/news.html)
