Eurasia Press & News
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani slams the US over the policies it pursues in the Middle East, warning that the region is very volatile.
“The United States says it is seeking to bring democracy to the Middle East but it is moving in the opposite direction,” press tv quoted Larijani as saying in a meeting with a number of Finnish lawmakers in Helsinki on Thursday.
Noting that unilateral US policies are already discredited and defeated in the world, the Majlis speaker said the Americans should respect others’ rights and stop their blatant violations of human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Larijani’s comments come as US forces and its foreign allies in Iraq and Afghanistan are facing the specter of leaving Iraq on terms far less advantageous than they had originally envisioned.
In Afghanistan the US and its NATO allies are looking at the option of negotiating with the Taliban insurgency or suffering a military collapse in the long term. This five and seven years respectively since they occupied these war-shattered countries in the name of bringing democracy and freedom to the people there.
Afghan deaths are counted in the tens of thousands with an untold figure of displacements running in the millions and spreadout within Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The death toll used for Iraqi civilians is not less than 1m dead, several million domestically and internationally displaced civilians.
Referring to Iran’s nuclear program, Larijani, formerly Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator, said that his country is ready to continue talks on the issue with the major powers.
“Negotiation is the only way to resolve the Iran’s nuclear question while imposing sanctions leads nowhere.”
The UN Security Council has so far imposed three rounds of sanctions against Iran in a bid to pressure the country into halting uranium enrichment.
The council also adopted a fourth resolution on 27 September, Resolution 1835, which essentially reconfirms the initial three measures without calling for any new strictures.
Washington and its allies accuse Iran of using its nuclear program as a cover to develop nuclear weaponry.
Iran, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), says it only seeks the civilian applications of nuclear technology, such as electricity generation and medical technologies.
The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency which has monitored Iran’s nuclear program more extensively than any other country in the organization’s history beginning in 2003, said in its latest report that it could not find any ‘components of a nuclear weapon’ or ‘related nuclear physics studies’ in the country.
Iranian officials have criticized Western countries over their ideologically driven pressure to halt its uranium enrichment, saying that they must use the language of reason and not force when dealing with Tehran’s nuclear portfolio.
Larijani head earlier warned on Tuesday that ‘Western double standards’ and ‘the outdated tactic of the carrot and stick’ have seriously undermined the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“It is amusing that the reasonable questions we raise in the course of nuclear talks are always met with pressure rather than logical answers,” said Iran’s current nuclear negotiations chief Saeed Jalili, in a recent letter to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
