Iran accuses US of ‘brazen’ plan to change its govt Moon Jae-in

SKOREA-POLITICS

United Nations — Iran is accusing US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of “a brazen interventionist plan” to change the current government that violates international law and the UN Charter.

Iran’s UN Ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres circulated on Tuesday that Tillerson’s comments are also “a flagrant violation” of the 1981 Algiers Accords in which the United States pledged “not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs”.

Tillerson said in a June 14 hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the 2018 State Department budget that US policy is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons “and work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government”.

“Those elements are there, certainly as we know,” he said.

Khoshroo said Iran expects all countries to condemn “such grotesque policy statements and advice the government of the United States to act responsibly and to adhere to the principles of the (UN) Charter and international law”.

He noted that Tillerson’s comments came weeks after President Hassan Rouhani’s re-election to another four-year term and local elections in which 71 percent of the Iranian people participated. Rouhani is a political moderate who defeated a hardline opponent.

“The people of Iran have repeatedly proven that they are the ones to decide their own destiny and thus attempts by the United States to interfere in Iranian domestic affairs will be doomed to failure,” Khoshroo said.

“They have learned how to stand strong and independent, as demonstrated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.”

He said Tillerson’s statement also coincided with the release of newly declassified documents that “further clarified how United States agencies were behind the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular and democratically elected prime minister of Iran on August 19, 1953”.

At the June 14 hearing, Tillerson said the Trump administration’s Iranian policy is under development.

“But I would tell you that we certainly recognise Iran’s continued destabilising [role] in the region,” Tillerson said, citing its payment of foreign fighters, support for Hezbollah extremists, and “their export of militia forces in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen”.

US lawmakers have long sought to hit Iran with more sanctions in order to check its ballistic missile programme and rebuke Tehran’s continued support for terrorist groups, and on June 15 the Senate approved a sweeping sanctions bill.

The bill imposes mandatory sanctions on people involved in Iran’s ballistic missile programme and anyone who does business with them.

The measure also would apply terrorism sanctions to the country’s Revolutionary Guards and enforce an arms embargo. It now goes to the House.
Senators insisted the new Iran sanctions won’t undermine or impede enforcement of the landmark nuclear deal that Former President Barack Obama and five other key nations reached with Tehran two years ago.

Meanwhile, tensions have been escalating between the US and North Korea following the death of US student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested in North Korea and sent home in a coma after 18 months, and in the face of Pyongyang’s military and nuclear ambitions.

Moon Jae-in, the new leader of North Korea’s neighbour and arch enemy, South Korea, is headed to Washington for talks this week.
North Korea’s state news agency KCNA said: “The America-first principle . . . advocates the world domination by recourse to military means just as was the case with Hitler’s concept of world occupation.”

And it went on to accuse Trump of “following Hitler’s dictatorial politics” to divide others into two categories, “friends and foes” in order to justify “suppression”.

It is not the first time the secretive state has evoked Hitler in propaganda against the US.

After George W Bush branded the North, along with Iran and Iraq an “axis of evil”, Pyongyang hit back, saying the then-US president was a “tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade” and a “political imbecile bereft of even elementary morality”.

America has been angling for tougher sanctions against North Korea because of the states’ insistence on developing missiles to carry nuclear warheads greater distances.

KCNA said the US’ policy of blocking medical supplies was “an unethical and inhumane act, far exceeding the degree of Hitler’s blockade of Leningrad”.
And it added: “The Trump way of thinking that the whole world may be sacrificed, just for the better living of the US, has put even its allies and stooges in a pretty fix.”

Moon is new in the job, but has already signalled he will move to pressure China on tightening the screws around North Korea. — AFP

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