Bulletin de liaison etd'information - Institut kurde de Paris

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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Özeti
Tehran on a "more critical" basis.
The confrontation represented a serious
setback to Britain's efforts in recent
months to thaw relations between
~Iran and the West. -The twoeountries
exchanged ambassadors in July 1999
after a decade-long break, and Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw has visited Tehran
twice since Sept. Il seeking help for the
anti-terror coalition in Mghanistan and
trying to capitalize on the Iranians' opposition
to the Taliban regime.
The Foreign Office on Friday denied
the claims about its nominee, David
Reddaway, 48. Ina statement, it said he
was "exceptionally well qualified for
the job" and asserted that Britain would
not be proposing another candidate. Mr.
Reddaway has served twice in Tehran,
is married to an Iranian and speaks
Farsi. He is not Jewish.
"This does not mean a complete reversal
of our policy of critical engagement,
which by its nature is bound to be
difficult, but it will not help," the Foreign
Office statement said."Jt does
mean our bilateral dialogue will inevitably
become more criticaL"
Hamid Reza Asefi, spokesman for
the li'anian Foreign Ministry, expressed
surprise at Britain' s reaction. "Whether,
or not to accept the ambassador proposed
by a country is the natural right of
the host country," he told the official
Iranian press agency, !RNA. "This is
not an unprecedented affair. Jt has
happened many times in the diplomatic
relations of various countries without
overshadowing their ties."
,There was speculation in London that
the action against Mr. Reddaway, which
the-Foreign Qffice~said~wasonly ~'conclusively"
confirmed Friday, may have
been precipitated by Old Guard conservatives
exploiting President George
W. Bush's denunciation of Iran in his
State of the Union speech last week as
part ,of an "axis of evil" with Iraq and
North Korea.
Britain is America's closest ally in
the anti-terror campaign and was denounced
recently by the hard-line Iranian
supreme leader, Ayatollah Sayed
Ali Khamenei, as a "servant of the
U.S."
U.S. officials claim that Iran 'is developing
weapons of mass destruction,
undermining the pro-U.S. government in
Kabul, destabilizing Afghan regions
ne~ its border by rearming and fmancing
warlords, and giving arms and support to
terrorist groups in the Middle East.
Britain appeared to, toughen its own
tone Friday night, saying in the statement
that "we have always had concerns about
Iran' s support of terrorist groups and development
of weapons of mass destruction.
" The Foreign Office said that Prime
Tony Minister Blair had discussed the
case ofMr. Reddaway last month with the
Iranian president, Mohammed Khatami,
the reformist leader who had invited Mr.
Straw to Tehran in September.
Britain cut ties with Iran in 1989 after
Ayatollah RuhollahKhomeini, issued a
fatwa urging people to kill the British
author S~an Rushdie because, he as-,
serted, his:~ook "The Satanic Verses"
was blasphemous; Formal relations were
restored in 1998 when the fatwa was
lifted.
British hopes of producing a thaw in
the relations between Iran and the West
this autumn had been high. On arriving in
Tehran Sept. 24 - the frrst time a British
'foreign secretary had been there since the
Islamic revolution of 1979 - Mr. Straw
said: "I'm devoting as much time as I
can to ensure that the rel~tionship is a
much deeper one than it has been in the
past. What l'vestarted today is a high
level dialogue with the Iranians, of a kind
that 'we've not enjoyed for years."
That trip sharpened disputes between
reformist and extremist elements in Iran, '
with a conservative newspaper commenting,
"The bad smell ofthe British is
in our nostrils once again ...
!'1r.Blair'~ spokesman acknowledged
Fnday the mternal struggle and said
Britain would still seek to engage the
reformist side. "I think everyone knO\ys
there is a debate within Iran about which
direction it should go in,"' he said, "and
it should come as no surprise therefore
that decisions are sometimes made that
disappoint us,"
Evil in Baghdad and Tehran • By David Ignatius,
Europe isn't being helpful
PARIS
Listening to the' chorus of
, European criticism of Pres-
, ident George W. Bush's "axis of
~ evil" speech, 'I found myself,
recalling an evening spent nearly 20 '
years ago in the apartment of a Soviet
, dissident in Moscow.
It was just after, President Ronald
Reagan had given his famous speech
denouncing the Soviet Union as an
"evil empire." The conventional wisdom
at that time was that Reagan had
made il stupid blunder, supposedly
typical ofhis cowboy brand of conservatism.,
How differently the speech
'was perceived in Moscow.
, My host that night was a Russian
pr~fessor who had .lost everything -
his job, his ,privileges, his ability to
, ,~vel- because he had dared to question
the' Communist ,rulers. He turned
,to me" im American visitor, and said
something I have never forgotten.
"How can it be," he wondered, "that
the United States has elected a president
who dares to tell the truth about
the Soviet Union? We thought that
America, with all its money, had be- '
'come decadent. But now you have
called us by our true name."
I never looked at Reagan in quite the But will it work? That pragmatic '
same way after that. In the very naïv- test is the right way to measure the '
eté of his comment, he had broken Bush policy. And by that measure,
through a barrier. He had given ordin- there are some serious problems.
ary Russians and East Europeans hope The Bush administration seems to
that communism would not bl'!a per- believe that Iran is in a prèrevolutionmanent
condition. The Evil Empire ary state. That is why Bush's speech
was gone within less than a decade. included a blast at "an unelected few
This past week, all right-thinking [who) repress the Iranian people's
people in Europe seemed convinced hope f9r freedom."
that Bush had made another stupid Administration officials point' to
American blunder. France's foreign the wave of popular unrest that has
minister, Hubert'Véd,rine, summed up swept Iran in the past several yearsthe
European critique on Wednesday ranging ~from dissident mullahs in
when he called Bush's anti-terrorism Qum to striking schoolteachers or the
policy "simplistic."
"soccer rioters" who have taken to the
But, as with Reagan in 1983, Euro- streets after recent World Cup games.
peans seem to be missing the point. Thé officials note that after Sept. n,
For starters, the reäl audience for the pro-American demonstrators held
, ,candlelight marches in north Tehran.
"axis of evil" comment was not in the The Bush argument is that it makes
mirroredcorridorsoftheQuaid'Orsay no more sense to ally with a halfway
but among ordinary Iranians living in reformer such as President Mothe
dirt allexways o.fsou~ T~hr.an. hammed Khatami than it would have
And far from beIng sImplIstIc, the made to embrace' Yuri Andropov
Bush speech enga~ed wPa! may be ~e when Soviet reform efforts were bemost
s~btle and dIfficult Issue of !hIS ginning in the early 1980s. Better to
decade .. how to encourage p~lItlcal, encourage the true revolutionaries.
change iD Iran and Iraq. (Let s. drop The practical problem with this ar-
~orth Kore~ f~r "a ~oment. I.ts lDclu- gument is that it's dangerous, both for
SIO!!on the ~XIS lIst was a bIt of rhetoncal
overkIll.)
the Iranian revolutionaries and for the
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