TEHERAN, July 12, (AFP): Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a bitter opponent of serving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Tuesday came out in support of talks with Tehran’s archfoe Washington.
“I think today we can utterly negotiate on an equal footing and mutual respect with the United States,” Rafsanjani said in a interview with a specialised reformist website, irdiplomacy.ir.
Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic relations in more than three decades following the Islamic revolution of 1979 that toppled the US-backed shah.
Rafsanjani said Ahmadinejad had already “broken the taboo of negotiations with the United States” by “sending letters to American officials that remain unanswered,” referring to messages to President Barack Obama and his predecessor George W. Bush.
Rafsanjani, who was president from 1989 to 1997, is considered a relative moderate and pragmatist. But he has never hidden his disdain for Ahmadinejad, who defeated him in a 2005 presidential election.
He now heads the Expediency Council, a top political arbitration body and an advisory arm to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Rafsanjai added that he had tried during his time in office to initiate a dialogue with Washington, but he had been vetoed by Khamenei.
“In my time the Americans showed signs of wanting to soften their stance, but we responded coldly because we followed the policy of the leader (Khamenei), which did not favour” a normalisation with the United States.
Iran’s all-powerful Khamenei has the final say in the Islamic republic’s macro policies, namely in foreign policy.
In his message for the Iranian New Year in late March, Khamenei said: “The US president has sent a message that he supports (the Iranian people) ... but he is lying.”
Rafsanjani also took a swipe at Ahmadinejad’s “reckless” policies, saying they had led to “bad relations” between Iran and foreign countries. Officials “say they want to have relations with all the world, but in practice it’s different. It is not without reason that our relations with neighbouring countries are so bad,” he said. “They have a reckless approach on economy, culture, social and foreign policies.”