The End of a Honeymoon?
Arab News - By Amir Taheri
Sep 5, 2003
Until just a few weeks ago, Iran and Britain appeared to be destined for a mutually enjoyable partnership.
On Tuesday, however, the British government, having recalled its ambassador, Richard Dalton, announced the “temporary closure” of its embassy in Tehran. The decision came hours after shots had been fired at the embassy building in the center of the Iranian capital. Asked who might have been responsible, the Iranian authorities say they did not know. But this seems hardly credible since hundreds of people, including more than a dozen policemen, some of them supposed to be guarding the embassy, watched the whole bizarre episode. It is clear that the Islamic Republic wished to pass a “strong message” to “perfidious Albion”, and in the only way it knows best.
Tony Blair’s government has invested a great deal in courting Iran’s ruling mullahs. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw visited Tehran four times in less than two years. In all his meetings with President George W. Bush, Blair hammered in the theme of “constructive dialogue” with Iran as alternative to “regime change.” By last March Britain had emerged as Iran’s most ardent supporter in the European Union. The British assumed the leadership of efforts to conclude a trade agreement between the EU and the Islamic Republic. London also supported Tehran’s bid to join the WTO despite Washington’s reservations.
Some Khomeinist militants received scholarships to study at British universities. It was one such student who became the cause of a sudden end to the Anglo-Iranian courtship. The man in question is one Hadi Soleimanpour, who had enrolled at Durham University to study Islamic civilization. Now in his early 40s, Soleimanpour was no ordinary student. Having joined the Khomeinist revolution when in his teens, he had been one of the first to join the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary force created by Khomeini in 1979 to crush his opponents. Soleimanpour eventually ended up as the Islamic Republic’s ambassador in Buenos Airs, the Argentine capital.
His tenure as ambassador had coincided with the blowing up of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires — an attack that killed scores of Argentines, many of them Jews. Iran had always denied any involvement in the attack. By the mid-1990s the episode seemed to have been shelved. Last year an Argentine court reopened the case and ended up by formally pointing the finger at Tehran. It issued arrest warrants for a number of Iranian officials including Soleimanpour who had just landed in Britain to start a new life as a middle-aged student. Contacted by Interpol, the British police picked up Soleimanpour without informing the Foreign Office in London.
That led to what could only be described, if not as “a clash of civilizations”, as a clash of political cultures.
Tehran ’imply cannot understand that the British government may well be unable to order the police to let Soleimanpour loose. The mullahs’ anger at Britain is partly understandable. After all, on many occasions European Union states have ignored their laws to let Iranian suspects escape police arrest. In 1996, a Berlin court issued an arrest warrant for Ali Fallahian, a mullah who was the Islamic Republic’s minister for intelligence and security at the time. Fallahian had been charged with participation in the murder of four Kurdish dissidents in Berlin in 1992. At the time the warrant was issued, Fallahian was visiting Germany. Having learned of the warrant, the German authorities arranged for the mullah to fly back to Tehran before the police arrived. The French had done even better. In 1994, Prime Minister Edourad Baladur ignored a Swiss demand for the extradition of two Iranians charged with political murders in Switzerland and helped them fly back to Tehran. Similar cases could be cited concerning other European countries.
Soleimanpour is not the only senior Iranian official to be subject to an Interpol arrest warrant on charges of terrorism. The latest the list of wanted Iranians contains 48 names, including that of the “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Velayati. (On Wednesday the Islamic Republic decided to forbid, until further notice, all foreign travel by those on the list.)
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