THE IRANIAN regime is under threat from a determined internal opposition that includes senior clerics disillusioned with the government, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner has said.
A huge majority of “very high-ranking Shia” disagreed with the government and contested its religious values, he claimed.
Iranian authorities have been unable to stop an anti-government protest movement, set off by the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, despite intensifying their crackdown after eight people were killed during protests on December 27th. The protests have plunged Iran into its worst internal crisis in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history.
“We can all see that the regime is under threat from people who are very determined – Iranians, some of them very religious, from the Shia hierarchy itself,” Mr Kouchner said on radio yesterday. “Yes, the regime is under threat from internal opposition and I don’t know what it could lead to.”
Asked whether he hoped the Iranian government would be overthrown, Mr Kouchner said: “It’s not for me to wish for that or not. We’re continuing to talk to the Iranians.”
Relations between France and Iran – already strained over Tehran’s contested nuclear programme – have been further damaged in recent months by the trial of a young French teaching assistant accused of espionage.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy insists Clotilde Reiss (24), who was arrested in Tehran in July during the turmoil that followed the election, is innocent and has described her as a pawn in a diplomatic game.
Paris has refused an Iranian proposal for a prisoner swap between her and an Iranian man who is serving a life sentence in a French jail for the 1991 assassination of a former Iranian prime minister.
On the nuclear issue, Mr Kouchner expressed frustration with Iran’s latest diplomatic move and said it was “unfortunately not possible” to talk seriously with Tehran about its nuclear plans.
Iran rebuffed a western deadline of December 31st to accept an enrichment fuel deal aimed at calming international fears – denied by Iran – that it is trying to build nuclear weapons. Under the UN-drafted deal, Iran would swap enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, reducing its capacity to make nuclear weapons.
After rejecting the December 31st deadline, Iran last weekend set a new deadline of its own to end the standoff.
In what foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki described as an “ultimatum”, it warned that it would produce nuclear fuel on its own if there was no deal to have the West deliver the fuel in exchange for Tehran’s enriched uranium by the end of January.
Mr Kouchner described the Iranian move as a “diplomatic pirouette” to “side-step” the issue, “giving an ultimatum to those who have offered to help them, that is the international community, including France”.
He noted that the deadline of December 31st had now expired but did not say what course France or its allies might now pursue.
Reports suggest that the US is seeking support for new sanctions against Iran at the UN.