TEHRAN, Feb 14 (AFP) - Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi on Monday insisted a death sentence against British writer Salman Rushdie remained in force as his reformist government's conservative opponents raised the issue in the midst of a key election battle.
"There has never been any question of annulling the fatwa," or death sentence, which revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini imposed on Rushdie for blasphemy in 1989, Kharazi told a press conference.
He said London had agreed to press ahead with the normalization of relations with Tehran without insisting on a formal lifting of the death sentence.
"The two countries decided together to normalize their relations and agreed that this issue would not be an obstacle," Kharazi told a press conference.
After a meeting with Kharazi in New York in late 1998, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said he had won an undertaking from Tehran that it would not seek to implement the fatwa against the writer.
Just days before key parliamentary elections in which the reformers are trying to end the conservatives' stranglehold over the legislature, the regime's conservative-controlled propaganda arm said Sunday that Muslims should still seek to implement the fatwa.
The fatwa is "still in force" and "Muslims should help carry it out," the Organization for Islamic Propaganda said.
The statement was echoed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, whose commanders also issued a statement saying the death sentence remained in effect.
But Kharazi said their statements were "not representative of the Iranian government," echoing comments he made in 1998 distancing Tehran from a $2.8 million bounty placed on Rushdie's head by a conservative religious foundation here, Khordad-15.
Leading reformers declined to be drawn into the renewed controversy over the fatwa which came on the eve of its 11th anniversary and in the midst of heated campaigning for Friday's key polls.
"There is nothing to comment on," said key reformist candidate Ali Reza Nuri, brother of the radicals' jailed standard-bearer, former Interior Minister Abdollah Nuri.
But political analysts said that the renewed clamor over Rushdie was a desperate attempt by the conservatives to find a stick with which to beat the reformers.
"This attempt by the conservatives to revive the whole issue of the fatwa has one goal only - to suggest that the reformers and the radicals are supporters of Rushdie," said Kazem Kordovani. "It is a political move, but in my view it'll come to nothing. It's a desperate effort."
And European diplomats here dismissed any possibility of the affair damaging Tehran's improving relations with the European Union. "The relations between the EU and Iran are now established on solid foundations - this red herring is going to have no impact," one diplomat said.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry has always said that the fatwa itself is "irrevocable."
But in a September 1999 interview with the BBC, Cook said he believed Tehran was "actively" trying to prevent it being carried out.
The official IRNA news agency reported that Kharazi and Cook had "exchanged views on bilateral ties" in a phone call Monday, but gave no details of their discussion.
In a statement received by AFP in Nicosia on Monday, Iran's Baghdad-based armed opposition said the new comments from Iranian leaders supporting the death sentence showed London's move to restore ties had been a naked attempt to secure trade.
"The ruling clerics' emphasis on the need to implement the anti-Islamic and criminal fatwa for Rushdie's death shows clearly that the so-called 'Cook-Kharazi accord' in 1998 was merely a shameful deal to facilitate trade ties," the People's Mujahedeen said. The People's Mujahedeen have been fighting the Islamic government of Iran for 20 years.
The Mujahedeen said that the British policy of appeasement "had only encouraged and strengthened the mullah's policy of export of terrorism and fundamentalism."
