An agreement on lifting the sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear program would be a “giant step” forward after decades of hostility by the United States, according to Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Islamic Republic’s former president.
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Rafsanjani, a close confidante of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, and a heavyweight leader himself for 40 years, hailed Iran’s decision to negotiate directly with Washington.
“We have broken a taboo,” he told the Guardian in an exclusive interview in his Tehran office.
Rafsanjani is a highly influential supporter of the current president, Hassan Rouhani, whose election in 2013 paved the way for nuclear talks, the daily reported.
He was speaking on Tuesday before it was announced that the Vienna negotiations between Iran, the US and five other world powers had been extended for an additional three days after missing a second deadline. The first deadline on 30 June also passed without agreement.
“Having face-to-face negotiations is better than talking at long distance through the media,” Rafsanjani said. “Iran is dead serious. If the other parties are as serious we will have an agreement for sure. That Iran is talking directly to the US is a good move. We have broken a taboo.”
Rafsanjani also said US hostility to Iran had long been the main problem. “Before the [1979] revolution the US was the main supporter of the Shah’s regime and after the revolution, in the imposed war [with Iraq] it was against us too. Now in the nuclear talks, if we see a different US, it will have a positive impact on the Iranian public.” It was “not impossible” that an American embassy could reopen in Tehran. “But that depends on the behavior of both sides.”
He quoted Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous saying: “If the US behaves in a humane way we will have no problem with it.”
Rafsanjani, 80, is chairman of Iran’s Expediency Council, which mediates between parliament and the president under the overall authority of Imam Khomeini’s successor as supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to the publication. Rafsanjani was de facto commander in chief of Iranian forces during the bloody eight-year war with Iraq. In his two terms as president from 1989 to 1997 he mended fences with the wealthy Persian Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, which had supported Saddam Hussein.
Now, at a time of high tension, strategic rivalry and sectarian tensions across the region, he attacked the Saudis for “interfering in the nuclear talks” as well their “bombardment of the Yemeni people”.
The Saudis had also “lost their sensitivity to the Palestinian cause”,” he said. “We would like to have friendly relations with them.”
“The holy Qur’an says that Muslims are brothers and should live in brotherhood. They must not be tyrants to each other,” he added.
On hostility to Israel – a centrepiece of Iranian policy since 1979 – he saw no prospect for change. “We don’t need to change.” he said.” We support the rights of Palestinians. We are not participating in any military action in Palestine but we advise them on political issues. As long as Palestinian rights are not taken into account we cannot have good relations with the US.”
Israel, which has its own undeclared nuclear arsenal, opposes the emerging P5+1 agreement with Iran and sees Iran as a sworn enemy that backs the Palestinian movement Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Guardian wrote.
Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), referred to in Farsi, as in Arabic, by its pejorative name Daesh, was “humiliating Islam”. Iran was helping fight it in both Syria and Iraq at the request of their governments. “Syria is under attack by so many terrorist groups,” he said. “We are against terrorism anywhere in the world.”
According to the daily, Rafsanjani, like Rouhani, is usually described as a pragmatic moderate rather than a reformist in the lexicon of Iran’s complex political system. He said he was optimistic about the future of the country because it had an increasingly educated population and elections at all levels.
/SR
