Controversy Continues Over Tehran-Riyadh Fragile Relations
Heated debates in Iran continue about Tehran's ties with Riyadh following an incident during the recent visit of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan.
Heated debates in Iran continue about Tehran's ties with Riyadh following an incident during the recent visit of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan.
The controversy ensued when at the conclusion of talks between bin Farhan and his Iranian counterpart on June 17, the venue of their joint press conference was suddenly changed.
While the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman and the state television insisted that changing the room was "due to a technical problem," Iranian reporters on social media insisted that the Saudi delegation refused to sit in a room where a big portrait of former IRGC Qods Force Commander Qassem Soleimani was posted on the wall.
Foreign policy analyst Diako Hosseini wrote in a tweet: "The Foreign Ministry should have been intelligent enough to predict the Saudis' sensitivities. Now that the ministry was not intelligent enough, the minister should have cancelled the news conference."
An Iranian commentator in Paris, Mohammad Javad Akbarin tweeted: "In 2019 Soleimani wanted to bring Syrian Leader Bashar Assad to a meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to attract media attention. Instead, it was [foreign minister] Zarif's threat to resign that became the day's news. Now, the general's picture has undermined all the achievements of the visit by the Saudi delegation. Dead or alive, Soleimani has always brought about a loss for the country's diplomacy and national interests."
Zarif was apparently caught off guard when Assad showed up in Tehran and was not even invited to the meeting with Khamenei.
At the same time, prominent Saudi columnist Mohammed Alsulami wrote in a series of tweets in both Arabic Persian that "Trust between the two countries is fragile and comments made by some political figures close to Iran shows how difficult is rebuilding mutual trust." He further called on Iranians to avoid using sarcastic language about the Iran-Saudi ties as the Saudis are not interested in “factional rivalries in Iran.”
At the same time, foreign policy analyst Ali Bigdeli told Nameh News website in Tehran that "Not all the problems between Tehran and Riyadh will be solved with a visit to Tehran by bin Farhan. He added that "Some Iranian officials have said that America’s hands will be cut off from the Middle east following the agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but this is not true."
He added: "We still do not have full diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. The Iranian ambassador to Riyadh has still not received his credentials from the King." He said in another part of his interview that Saudi promises of investing in Iran may not materialize as long as US sanctions against Iran are in place.
Bigdeli argued that Iran should follow a dynamic policy like Saudi Arabia and maintain healthy ties with both East and West rather than pinning all its hopes on the East.
Meanwhile, moderate news website Entekhab wrote in a commentary that two years after President Ebrahim Raisi declared Iran's policy of expanding ties with China, Iran's "looking east policy" has not been as successful as Saudi Arabia's relations with China.
The website wrote that despite signing a 25-year cooperation agreement with China, Iran's share of trade with Beijing only amounted to half a percent of China's international trade in 2022.
Generally, the total trade volume between Iran and China was less than $16 billion while Saudi Arabia maintained an annual trade of $106 billion with China in 2022, Entekhab maintained.
While sharp criticism about the deteriorating economy and “mismanagement” by Iran’s hardliner government has increased by both friends and foes, Raisi tried to present an acceptable picture of his performance by making claims and citing misleading or cherry-picked statistics.
The televised interview Tuesday evening was aired on the second anniversary of his win in the 2021 presidential vote that had none of the attributes of a competitive race. His most serious rivals were disqualified by the Guardian Council, a non-transparent body controlled by regime insiders loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Raisi repeated the regime’s unsubstantiated claim, first made by Khamenei, that the nationwide ‘Women, Life Freedom’ movement was a conspiracy by enemies to derail the success of the regime.
“The esteemed leader of the revolution indeed correctly proclaimed that the basis of the riots was the fact that enemies felt the country was moving toward progress and hope was returning to the people,” Raisi said about Khamenei drawing the line and defining the cause of the protests.
Regime officials never use the word ‘protest’ when it is about Iran. All anti-government demonstrations are ‘riots’.
The head of the Revolutionary Guard intelligence organization, Mohammad Kazemi claimed this week that 20 foreign secret services were involved in planning and organizing the protests that began last September when a 22-year-old woman was killed in ‘hijab police’ custody.
Raisi even claimed that nuclear talks with the West came to a halt because of the protests, while these negotiations hit a snag in the end of August or early September 2022, weeks before the anti-government movement began and the extent of the violence against protesters was revealed.
The United States said many times in 2022 that the Islamic Republic had presented “extraneous” demandswhen the European Union mediators presented a compromise draft agreement in mid-2022.
The bloody government response to protests that eventually took more than 500 civilian lives did become part of the US reasons for not pursuing a return to the JCPOA nuclear deal, but the first signs from Washington emerged in October and had nothing to do with the initial impasse in negotiations.
Raisi also made a series of misleading statements on the economy, including a claim that inflation dropped during his presidency, while Tehran media in May reported an inflation rate close to 70 percent.
Worse of all what he ignored to mention was a devastating drop in the value of the currency, rial, since September 2022. The rial, which was trading at around 280,000 to the US dollar in mid-2022, dropped to as low as 550,000 in early May. It is now trading at around 490,000. In short, the rial’s value almost halved in less than a year, with an incalculable damaging impact on the inflation rate in the months to come.
But the president in his interview tried to blame the war in Ukraine, which did have an inflationary impact on global prices, but nowhere near 70-percent inflation.
Iranian observers are at a loss to explain extravagant and demonstrably false statements by officials. Is it ignorance of facts, rosy reporting by bureaucrats to senior politicians or an outright and deliberate attempt to justify their failures?
Raisi’s statements come against the backdrop of reports about direct and indirect talks with the United States to reach an unwritten deal so the Tehran can receive some badly needed foreign currency if Washington agrees to allow its frozen funds in Iraq and South Korea to be released.
Two days before the executions, six Baha'i men had been also hanged over trumped up charges. They were among the 22 Baha’is who were sentenced to death out of about 100 Baha'i arrested as part of a crackdown in the southern city of Shiraz in the spring of 1983.
They were convicted for espionage as well as promoting Baha’i faith but in reality their crime was not recanting their beliefs, long hated by the Shia Muslim authorities who had taken over Iran a few years earlier.
The youngest of these women was Mona Mahmoudnejad, a 17-year-old girl whose father was also executed four months earlier, and the oldest of them was 57-year-old Ezzat Janami-Eshraghi, executed along with her daughter Roya that day, and two days after their father Enayatollah Eshraghi.
According to Ronald Reagan, the then US president who had pleaded to world leaders to join him to prevent the Iranian government's decision to execute the 22 Baha'is, 113 had already been hanged across Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, replied to Reagan’s plea at the time, saying: “If we don't have any other reason that they are American spies, Reagan's support for them is enough."
In the past several days, Iranian expatriate communities in addition to Baha’is and relatives of the victims held events to condemn the Islamic Republic’s executions and the unrelenting persecution of ethnic and religious minorities.
After an event in Oslo, Norwegian-Iranian politician Bijan Gharahkhani told Iran International that the most important issue for Iran today is the unity among people from different ethnicities and religions. He expressed hope for a future Iran in which no one is persecuted for their identities and views.
In Canada, Nahid Mazloum, the other daughter of Ezzat Janami Eshraghi who survived and escaped from the Islamic Republic, told New Canadian Media that “life goes on, but the pain never goes away,” before addressing a gathering of about 650 people from the Baha’i community in Vancouver last Friday, June 16.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in his message to the community in April during Ridván — a 12-day festival and the holiest time of the Baha’i calendar — said Canada is deeply concerned about the injustices endured by members of the faith in Iran.
In a letter from inside prison obtained by Iran International, human rights activist Narges Mohammadi said the execution of Baha’i women was “a manifestation, representation, and exposure of the tyrannical, anti-women regime of the Islamic Republic.”
The campaign of terror against Baha’is has been intensifying in recent years, according to the Worldwide Baha’i Community’s statement published in July 2022.
The Baha’i -- who number around 300,000 in Iran -- are the most persecuted religious minority in Iran. They are deprived of government jobs and university education, and the regime periodically instigates attacks on their communities, arrests them, confiscates their businesses and other assets, and demolishes their houses. The intelligence apparatus of the regime usually accuses the arrested Baha’is to having connections with the Baha’i Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel, the nine-member supreme ruling body of the Bahaʼi Faith.
Established by Bahaullah in the 19th century, the Baha’i faith initially spread in Iran and parts of the former Ottoman empire and remained mostly confined to Iran and the Ottoman empire until after the death of Bahaullah.
Its roots trace back to the religion of Ali-Mohammad Shirazi, known as the Bab (the gate), the founder of Babism who claimed to be a messenger of God in southern Iran in 1844. The Bab who said God would soon send a new prophet to mankind was executed for heresy against Islam which considers Muhammad as the last prophet of God.
In 1863 Bahaullah, the founder of Baha’i faith who was banished from Iran and settled in Iraq later, announced that he was the prophet promised by the Bab. The leadership of Baha’is fell to his son Abdul-Baha after his death in 1892 near Acre in present day Israel.
Baha’is believe in Muhammad as a prophet of God, and in the Quran as the Word of God while the Shia clergy consider Babism and the Baha’i faith as heretical sects.
The 1979 constitution of the Islamic Republic recognizes only Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has on several occasions called the Baha'i Faith a cult and in a religious fatwa in 2018 forbade contact, including business dealings, with followers of the faith.