Britain has announced it will attempt to engage Iran despite the Tehran government’s reaction to the country’s post-election violence.
“We continue to believe that the engagement we proposed with Iran is right, that we continue to say when we have concerns about treatment of the Iranians,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on Saturday.
Speaking to reporters at the Greek island of Corfu, Miliband said, “We should leave no room for excuse. The debate taking place in Iran is in reality a debate between Iran and the West.”
The European Union and the United States have criticized the Iranian government’s response to protests that sparked following the victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12 with nearly two-thirds of the votes.
Defeated presidential hopefuls Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi rejecting the election result as fraudulent and demanded a re-run.
At least 20 people were killed and many others injured when some protests turned violent. Tehran blames ’saboteurs’ for the deaths of the Iranian protesters.
Iran has lashed out at what it calls the West’s ‘interference’ in the country’s internal affairs, saying the ‘biased’ attitude of European countries and their media incited the unrest following the June 12 election.
“They …did not condemn the killing of thousands of Iranians along with the country’s president, prime minister, judiciary chief and lawmakers by the MKO [Mujahedin Khalq Organization] in 1981 and 1982,” a statement from Iran’s embassy in Berlin said on Friday.
The MKO, which identifies itself as a Marxist-Islamist guerilla army, was founded in Iran in the 1960s but was exiled some twenty years later for carrying out numerous acts of terror in the country.
The group, known as the Rajavi cult after its leader Masoud Rajavi, masterminded a slew of assassinations and bombings inside Iran, one of which was the 1981 bombing of the offices of the Islamic Republic Party in which more than 72 Iranian officials were killed including the then Judiciary chief Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=99216§ionid=351020601
June 27th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Miliband engaging, more like meddling and out right interfering.
Yeah like the protests weren’t insterigated by Mousaad and Zionist agencies.
This so called revolt stinks of a set up in order to wipe out another enemy of “Israel” by the back door.