BRUSSELS, Jan 13, (Agencies): Russia would regard any military intervention linked to Iran’s nuclear programme as a threat to its own security, Moscow’s departing ambassador to NATO warned on Friday.
“Iran is our neighbour,” Dmitry Rogozin told reporters in Brussels. “And if Iran is involved in any military action, it’s a direct threat to our security.”
Rogozin was speaking two days after the killing of a nuclear scientist in Tehran by a hitman on a motorcycle.
Kremlin Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said Israel was pushing the United States towards war with Iran, according to the Interfax news agency.
Russia, however, opposes a boycott of Iranian oil.
“We are definitely interested in the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” Rogozin said on Friday. “But at the same time, we believe that any country has the right to have what it needs to feel comfortable, including Iran.”
Rogozin, often described as an anti-Western hawk, was appointed deputy prime minister in December, and will oversee Russia’s defence sector when he returns to Moscow.
The United States, the European Union and Japan are drawing up sanctions on Iran to try to force it to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons programme. Tehran says its programme does not have military aims.
The United States on Thursday took punitive action against three oil companies dealing with Iranian oil.
EU foreign ministers are expected to agree on a ban on imports of Iranian crude oil on Jan 23 — though with a grace period to give European companies time to find alternative sources of crude.
Japan on Thursday pledged to take concrete action to cut its oil imports from Iran.
Backtrack
The Japanese government on Friday began backtracking on its pledge to join Washington’s drive to strangle Iranian oil exports as top figures insisted no decision had yet been made.
Just 24 hours after the country’s finance minister indicated Tokyo was falling into line with US demands, the premier and his foreign minister both signalled a significant retreat.
The US is trying to ramp up pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, threatening to cut off financial institutions that deal with the country’s central bank, so squeezing Tehran’s vital oil export business.
China has refused to play ball, but Washington appeared to score a diplomatic victory Thursday when Finance Minister Jun Azumi told visiting US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that Tokyo was planning to cut its imports from Iran.
But on Friday Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba was less than enthusiastic.
“The United States would like to impose sanctions. We believe it is necessary to be extremely circumspect about this matter,” Gemba told a news conference with French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe in Tokyo.
“We must look at this extremely carefully and find an intelligent solution. “We as a government are in the process of examining the issue and coming to a common position.”
Gemba said that over the last five years Japan had reduced its dependence on Iranian crude, which now made up around a tenth of the country’s oil imports.
“We are examining whether there is any advantage in a further reduction. But it is important to know what impact any reduction would have on the price of crude.
“One can imagine there would be negative effects (from this scheme) not just on Japan but on the world economy.”
At a separate press conference Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said his finance minister had been speaking in a personal capacity.
“Minister Azumi’s comment was to recap what has happened in the past so far, and expressed his personal views on the outlook,” Noda told reporters.
“As a government, we wish to engage in more concrete discussions at a working level.”
The seeming volte-face came after what appeared to be a coup for Washington when Azumi told Geithner that Japan was on board with the US bid to economically punish Iran for what it and its Western allies say is a weapons programme.
The United States on Thursday sanctioned China’s state-run Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp, which it said was Iran’s largest supplier of refined petroleum products, and a senior US official said an unrelated new sanctions law aimed to close down Iran’s central bank.
Washington also imposed sanctions on Singapore’s Kuo Oil Pte Ltd and FAL Oil Company Ltd, an independent energy trader based in the United Arab Emirates, as it sought to impress on Beijing and Tehran its resolve to increase economic pressure over Iran’s nuclear program.
The State Department said its punitive actions against the three companies was part of a broadening international effort to target Iran’s energy sector and persuade Tehran to rein in its nuclear ambitions.
“The sanctions announced today are an important step toward that goal, as they target the individual companies that help Iran evade these efforts,” the State Department said in a statement.
The sanctions were announced as the Obama administration is working out how to implement a law enacted on Dec. 31 that targets foreign financial institutions do business with Iran’s central bank, notably to buy crude oil.
Funeral
The Tehran funeral on Friday of a nuclear scientist blown up by a hitman saw the ruling clergy urge Iranians to rally behind it at a forthcoming election and face down Western threats against Iran’s nuclear programme.
In a mood of high emotion in a city increasingly beset by US and European sanctions and fears of war with Israel and the West, hundreds of chanting mourners carried the flag-draped coffin of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, killed on Wednesday by a motorcycle assassin in rush-hour traffic.
“Death to America! Death to Israel!” roared the crowd streaming away from weekly prayers at Tehran University, where the dead man was hailed as a martyr in the tradition of Imam Hussein, a revered figure for Iran’s Shi’ite branch of Islam.
“Nuclear energy is our absolute right!” young men chanted.
State radio described the 32-year-old chemical engineer, whose driver was also buried on Friday, as having worked on procurement for the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.
That disclosure may strengthen suspicions he was targeted by Israeli and Western agencies, who say that some covert Iranian purchases confirm their scepticism of Tehran’s assertion that it is not seeking to develop atom bombs.
With popular discontent growing over economic hardship and, among some, the lack of political freedoms, the clerical elite has portrayed Western hostility toward Iran’s leaders and their avowedly peaceful nuclear energy programme as a spur to national unity and for suppression of dissident voices.
Ayatollah Mohammed Emami-Kashani told worshippers Ahmadi-Roshan’s assassination — the latest of several attacks blamed on foreign agents — should encourage voters not to heed opposition calls to boycott a parliamentary election on March 2.
Though dissenters cannot take part, the vote will be a first test for an increasingly fractured leadership since big street protests followed the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August 2009 and since popular uprisings against autocracy hit Iran’s Arab neighbours, including ally Syria.
“The nation should wake up,” Emami-Kashani said in his sermon, repeating a warning by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Iran’s Western enemies were plotting to use the election to destabilise the 32-year-old Islamic Republic. “We have the election coming up and, as the leader said, the enemy is planning for the elections. All the people should be united.”
Ahmadi-Roshan, whose grieving family have been shown on national television accusing Iran’s enemies of killing him, was to be interred at a shrine close to a fellow nuclear scientist assassinated in the same way two years ago, on Jan. 12, 2010.
Ahmadinejad, away on a tour of Latin America, said: “Once again the dirty hands of arrogance and the Zionist elements have deprived our scientific and academic community of the graceful presence of one of our young intellectuals and scientists.
“Those criminals who think they can impede Iranian intellectuals and elites in their growth and evolution should know that such behaviour does not only not prevent the dear country from its development path but it multiplies Iranians’ will and determination to pursue their national pride in the world’s scientific fields,” ISNA news agency quoted him saying.
Mohammad Javad Larijani, secretary-general of the Iranian High Council for Human Rights, has written to the UN human rights commissioner calling for a committee to be set up to investigate the killing, Fars news agency said. UN officials have said “extrajudicial executions” are illegal, but that it is up to Iran in the first instance to investigate the killing.
Israel, which has floated threats of military action to thwart any Iranian nuclear weaponry, has made no comment.
Presumed owner of the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal, Israel has a history of killing enemies abroad and had warned Iran only this week to expect more “unnatural” mishaps if it pursued its research and development in nuclear science.
Some Iranians have called for reprisals against Israel.
The United States, sympathetic to its ally’s view that an Iranian atomic bomb could threaten the Jewish state’s existence, has strenuously denied killing the scientist and says it is sticking to economic sanctions to change Tehran’s mind.
“We have some ideas as to who might be involved,” US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday.
“But we don’t know exactly who was involved.”