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Iran Warns Germany Over Diplomatic Row
TEHRAN (News Agencies) - Iran flexed its growing political muscle Monday, warning Berlin not to make an international incident out of heavy jail terms slapped on Iranian reformists including a translator at the German embassy.
But Germany fired back with a sharply worded show of support for embattled Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who counts several close allies among those convicted by the conservative-led revolutionary court.
The diplomatic wrangling erupted after the court handed out stiff jail terms Saturday over a political meeting in Berlin last year that conservative Iranian authorities said was unIslamic and aimed at overthrowing the regime.
"German leaders must treat this matter wisely in order to avoid damaging bilateral relations," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi said, cited by the official IRNA news agency.
"Any link between this trial of Iranian citizens and relations between Iran and Germany is unacceptable and unreasonable," he said, underlining that Tehran would accept no outside interference in its internal affairs.
Embassy translator Said Sadr, who had been facing a possible death sentence, was given a decade in prison along with pro-reform journalist Akbar Ganji in connection with the Berlin gathering last April.
Several other reformists were given sentences of between four and nine years while a dissident cleric who used the seminar to challenge Iran's Islamic dress code for women was charged with waging war against God.
He is being tried separately by a special clerical court and could be facing the death sentence.
The conference was sponsored by a German foundation with links to the German Greens party, a key part of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's ruling coalition, whose most prominent member is Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
The Berlin meeting was to examine Iran's political future after reformists won a majority in parliament but descended into chaos, including a man disrobing in protest, after being disrupted by Iranian opposition figures.
Iranian state television, which is run by conservatives, repeatedly showed footage that outraged conservatives as well as many reformists, who charged the broadcast was intended to undermine the reform movement.
But the acquittal of several people who attended the conference has led to charges that the convictions were "politically motivated," in the words of Tehran MP Mohammad-Reza Khatami, the president's brother.
Germany summoned the Iranian ambassador on Berlin to express its "deep concern" over the sentences, which in some cases included imprisonment in remote areas far from Tehran.
Chancellor Schroeder's office issued a strongly worded statement Monday indicating he would go ahead with a planned visit to Iran but suggesting the verdict was part of a "power struggle" inside the Islamic republic.
He said Germany "hopes that in the internal Iranian power struggle the reformist forces around President Khatami will win out."
Germany is Iran's largest European trading partner and Khatami's visit to Berlin last year was seen as a watershed in the Islamic republic's improving relations with Europe.
But the two nations have often had strained relations in recent years, dating back to German arms sales to Baghdad during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war which came on the heels of the 1979 Islamic revolution here.
A German court also accused the Iranian leadership of being involved in the assassination of Kurdish dissidents in Berlin in 1992's so-called Mykonos affair.
Iran later imposed a death sentence, which was ultimately revoked, on a German businessman for allegedly having sexual relations with a Muslim Iranian woman.
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