EU-Iran links grow despite denunciations

Date: 21/11/1996

By Elizabeth Wise

SALMAN Rushdie, the irritant in Europe's cosy relations with Iran, is once again stepping up the pressure on the EU to cut off all ties with Tehran and isolate the regime which has placed a death sentence on his head.

During an awards ceremony last week at which he received an EU literary prize, Rushdie called for the Union to end its 'critical dialogue' with Tehran, saying: “A dialogue makes no sense if your interlocutor ignores what you are saying.”

But it is the Union which appears not to be listening to Rushdie. The critical dialogue continues, with the next round due to be held at the end of this month when Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmoud Vaezi travels to Dublin for talks with the secretary-general of Ireland's foreign ministry, Pádraig MacKernon, and regional directors of the foreign ministries in Rome and The Hague.

The agenda will be the same as usual: terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, respect for international law and Iran's unhelpful stance in the Middle East peace process.

Diplomats do not expect breakthroughs in any of these areas. “They go through the same things every time,” said one.

Some EU member states criticise the dialogue as the wrong way to make Tehran give up its anti-democratic behaviour. But it appears more unlikely than ever that it will be halted - rather, European ties with Tehran seem to be multiplying.

Only last week, a delegation of Iranian parliamentarians made a tour of Europe, stopping in Helsinki, Dublin and Madrid. According to delegation leader Hassan Rouhani, who is also the secretary of Tehran's supreme security council, the trip was intended to “reinforce parliamentary and bilateral relations”.

Earlier this month, Vaezi was in Paris announcing that Tehran would buy ten Airbus planes and 400-million-ecu worth of communications satellites. He also revealed that he was negotiating a “billion-dollar project” with Elf, France's petroleum giant.

Crowing over other, unspecified “big economic projects”, Vaezi hinted at future high-level meetings between Paris and Tehran and predicted a “flourishing future for our economic relations”.

Italy is also building closer economic links with the regime. It has just guaranteed a loan of 450 million ecu made to Iran by a group of European and Japanese banks for expanding a steel factory in Isphahan and building new factories in other regions. The work will be done by an Italian firm.

Germany too has chipped in with an Iran connection this month. Normally reserved on the subject of the Middle East peace process, Bonn announced last week that Tehran was playing a constructive role in the process.

The secretary of state in Germany's foreign ministry, Peter Harmann, spent two days in Tehran with Iran's top officials attempting to put Bonn-Tehran relations, which have been strained lately due to the arrest in Germany of an Iranian charged with murder, back on a friendly footing.

Paris, Bonn and Rome have been ardent proponents of retaining the critical dialogue, despite objections from their EU partners and from Washington.

But the dialogue, established at the Edinburgh summit of December 1992, has so far been largely unsuccessful, by all accounts.

Foreign ministers held a noisy debate on the subject in March in Palermo, but the three countries' economic interests won the day and ministers have not debated it since. “There would have to be a specific incident which made it impossible to continue [the dialogue], but most people want to keep it going,” said an Irish diplomat.

When MacKernon meets Vaezi next week, he will feel obliged to raise the subject of Rushdie and the fatwah against the author.

Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen last week called on Iran to lift the death sentence on Rushdie as soon as possible, adding that his government “would never kneel to the fatwah”.

Denmark is alone in the EU in having officially frozen relations with Tehran, and began a boycott of the Union's critical dialogue in August despite having prised out of Tehran the so-called 'Copenhagen declaration' of 1995 that it would never send agents to kill Rushdie.

Tehran, however, refuses to sign such a declaration with the Union and the EU does not appear to be pushing it very hard to do so.

After Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring met his Iranian counterpart in September in the margins of a United Nations general assembly meeting in New York, he said that the subject had not come up during their talks.

The European Commission is not strong-arming Tehran either. Instead, it actually gives Iranian exports the benefit of privileged access to European markets under the Commission's Generalised System of Preferences (GSP).

Iran has been on the GSP list since 1970 as a member of the 'group of 77' countries which declared themselves to the UN as developing countries.

Commission officials say there are no moves to remove Iran from that list.

Vaezi said in Paris that French Foreign Minister Hervé de Charette had told him that France wanted to be “Iran's first economic partner”.

Vaezi or Charette (or both) may have been taking aim at Washington with that statement, hoping to hit back at US President Bill Clinton for the new D'Amato law punishing foreign companies for investing in Iran and Libya's oil sectors.

The law puts EU diplomats in an uncomfortable position. “Our view is that the D'Amato law is not appropriate in international law and we oppose it. But we are not siding with the Iranians,” said one.

Even Rushdie is not calling for an economic embargo against Iran. He called on the Union last week to “tighten the vice, without going as far as an embargo”.

But he has made it clear that he will keep up his pressure on the Union until EU efforts to get the fatwah lifted are successful. “Europeans must show their muscle and keep threatening consequences if Tehran maintains the fatwah against me,” he said.