Angry regime accusations of provocative meddling by Britain, the US and Europe in Iran’s post-election upheaval have been crisply batted away by British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Miliband and other Western politicians. But the daily torrent of allegations is straining already rocky relations with Tehran and could have a lasting negative impact in a range of policy areas — principally on future efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
A seemingly orchestrated campaign to blame Iran’s troubles on the West is now in full swing and it is uncertain how far the regime is prepared to go. British and European ambassadors have been repeatedly carpeted by the foreign ministry. BBC broadcasts have been jammed and its resident correspondent expelled. And in an unsubtle attempt to deflect attention from himself, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US President Barack Obama to “correct your interfering stances.”
Following the cue by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday, when he described Britain as the “most evil” of Iran’s foreign foes, pro-government media have escalated their attacks.
PHOTO: AFP
“Brown is one of the most inefficient politicians of England who has witnessed cases of financial corruption in his Cabinet ... and has moved toward collapse and destruction,” the Siyasat-e-Ruz newspaper said. “He is trying to interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs in order to hide his failures.”
According to the BBC’s monitoring service, Iranian al-Alam television has been continually broadcasting “confessions” by two alleged members of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, also known as the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, a US-designated terrorist group opposed to the regime. Al-Alam said the two had admitted receiving instructions from the group’s “operations room in Britain” that included incitement of demonstrators and “sabotage attacks inside Iran.” Other channels have carried similar reports.
Raising this witch-hunt to a new heights of fantasy, Iran’s security forces are claiming that unknown “terrorists” and “vandals,” rather than they themselves, were responsible for shooting and killing demonstrators in Tehran on Saturday. With relatively independent figures such as Ali Larijani, speaker of the Majlis (parliament), giving credence to talk of foreign plots, and with the Majlis’ foreign policy commission calling for a review of diplomatic ties with Britain, it is possible on current trends that Britain’s ambassador may soon be packing his bags. Ominously, a foreign ministry spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi, refused on Monday to rule out expulsion of foreign ambassadors.
Unsourced reports are circulating, meanwhile, that British banks have frozen US$1.6 billion in funds belonging to Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the supreme leader. This supposed affront is cited as another reason for displeasure with Britain in high places.
Saner voices can still be heard above the din.
“Agitating, and [making] insulting propaganda against the people, who have constantly moved independently, and linking their peaceful actions to foreigners, is a symbol of wrong policies which increase the gap between the people and the government,” reformist former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami warned at the weekend. But in its dash for foreign scapegoats, nobody in the regime is listening.
Through their aggressive actions and rhetoric in the past week, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have gone a long way to making Netanyahu’s case for him. Speaking on US television, the Israeli prime minister didn’t quite say “I told you so.” He didn’t have to.
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