Iranian hawks soften stand towards U.S.

By Kesava Menon

MANAMA (BAHRAIN), JUNE 4. Iranian conservatives, strangely enough, have started lining up to make the radical suggestion that their country should try to restore relations with the U.S. These suggestions are being made even as the President, Mr. Hojatolesslam Syed Mohammed Khatami, who was once thought of as the politician most likely to bring about this change, maintains a studied silence on the subject. It would have been tempting to think that the conservatives have changed tack purely for political purposes but there may be more to it than meets the eye if other factors are taken into account.

Conservative candidates for the June 8 Presidential election and theologians considered close to the Supreme Religious Leader, Ayatollah Syed Ali Khamenei, are among those who have suddenly adopted a soft line towards the U.S. Among the candidates who have spoken in favour of a review of policy towards the U.S., in terms that suggest they prefer a positive policy, are the Defence Minister, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, Mr. Abdollah Jasbi, Mr. Mansour Razavi and Mr. Mahmoud Kashani. Even Mr. Ali Fallahian - the only cleric in the fray, a man indicted by a German court in the assassination of four dissident Kurds in a Berlin restaurant and accused by Iranian journalists for the murders of political dissidents - has declared himself in favour of re-establishing ties with the U.S. Only Mr. Ahmad Tavakoli, considered to be the strongest of the nine candidates challenging Mr. Khatami, appears not to have made any pro-U.S. statements.

There could well be a very innocent explanation. All the candidates listed above bar Mr. Tavakoli have given interviews to the Western press or made the pro-U.S. remarks in the presence of Western journalists. It could well have been that these candidates had no choice but respond to pointed questions on the issue. Most of these positive statements, except those of Mr. Kashani, have been of the generalised variety and usually hedged by the conditions that Iran has traditionally wanted the U.S. to meet before they would agree for talks. Only Mr. Jasbi appears to have called for unconditional talks.

Another possible explanation is that these statements have been cast into the public discourse in order to garner votes. All the candidates know very well that more than half the voters have come of age after the 1979 election and that for them the old animosities towards the U.S. are not that much of an issue. Moreover, younger Iranian voters are very keen that their country end its international insularity especially, its estrangement from the West. This is not merely because they are enamoured of Western culture or because they feel that this isolation has inhibited Iran from fulfilling its potential. The younger Iranians know that without such an opening up, foreign investments, and the jobs it would add, and the opportunity to travel abroad for study and work would just not be available.

The pro-U.S. statements by the candidates could, therefore, just be a ploy to attract younger voters.

What is, however, significant is that Mr. Hojatolesslam Taha Hashemi, a theologian considered close to Ayatollah Khamenei, has also endorsed the call in recent days.

In an interview to Reuters, this cleric proposed that discrete talks could take place to pave the ground for more substantive negotiations. Incidentally, in his interview, Mr. Kashani, who has been involved in the past in arbitration negotiations with the U.S. (on damage claims that each has with the other), has hinted that Iran-U.S. exchanges have been going on much more extensively than any one has suspected.

If Iran is sending out signals at the strategic plane and not just within the context of the domestic political context it could be because they want the U.S. sanctions to be lifted when the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) comes up for renewal in the U.S. Congress in August. But that could be too paltry an aim by Iranian standards.

Other reports from Washington suggest that Iran and the U.S. are moving closer, via the medium of Russia, to work out a joint strategy to extend support to the anti-Taliban coalition in Afghanistan.

In the context, it may be mentioned that the Iranian Foreign Office has issued a strongly worded statement condemning the Taliban's plan to impose a dress code on Hindus and Sikhs in that country. All these are stray signals that have yet to fall into a pattern but there have been too many of them to be coincidental or meaningless.

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