Iran's Reform Front Calls For A Nuclear Deal, New Foreign Policy
Iran's Reform Front has urged President Ebrahim Raisi to reach a nuclear deal and embrace reforms to avert serious harm to the country before it is too late.
Iran's Reform Front has urged President Ebrahim Raisi to reach a nuclear deal and embrace reforms to avert serious harm to the country before it is too late.
The Reform Front, an umbrella organization formed by several Iranian reformist parties, told Raisi that Iran's negligible economic growth rate and high inflation coupled with wrong economic and foreign policies have created the current crisis in the country.
The letter as published by Aftab News in Tehran, has been also sent to Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. In the letter, the Reform Front has accused the Raisi administration and the parliament (Majles) of failing to recognize the country's problems, determining priorities, and choosing the right solutions.
Iran’s reform movement is led by politicians and public figures loyal to the principle of having an Islamic government but are opposed to some of the radical policies of hardliners who follow Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. A reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, was elected in 1997 and served two terms until 2005, but hardliners gradually disarmed the reform movement and by 2020 pushed them completely out of power and even public service.
The Reform Front also warned that time is running out for addressing widespread dissent that seriously threatens Iran's security. The front also advised Raisi to work hard to improve per capita income and restore the people's purchasing power amid rising inflation and the constant devaluation of the national currency.
The letter added that despite government slogans of self-sufficiency, people's livelihood is tied to the fate of the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA. In the meantime, the government needs to reduce its irrelevant expenses by taking measures including cutting the budget of parallel institutions that duplicate the efforts of other organizations.
Meanwhile, the Reform Front charged that many of the measures the government pretends to be taking to solve the economic crisis, including increasing prices for essential commodities, are in fact initiatives that are solely meant to make up for its budget deficit, and are not serious efforts for structural change.
The Reform Front then offered six solutions for the country's economic problems. The first is reviving JCPOA and lifting of sanctions. This, said the letter, is the government's most important responsibility. The front advised Raisi "To seek the necessary permissions [from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei] and take quick brave measures to have this done in order to serve the country's national interests."
The letter also urged “détente” in foreign policy based on national interests and reconstituting Iran’s international banking ties, currently sanctioned by the United States, and blacklisted by the international financial watchdog, the FATF.
The Reform Front also called for boosting Iran's oil output within a short period of time with the objective of increasing government revenues and returning to the international oil markets as a key player. It also called of creating conditions favorable to international financial and technological investments.
Reformists also asked the government, dominated by hardliners, to reduce tensions within the country, as economic hardship and a harsh enforcement of religious dress code have unnerved the people and increased instability.
In fact, almost all proposed solutions can be summarized in the first suggestion: Returning to the JCPOA. All the other solutions proposed by reformists depend on reaching a nuclear agreement.
Enrique Mora, the European Union official who chaired year-long talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), is acting as a mediator between the teams led by Rob Malley, the United States special envoy, and Ali Bagheri-Kani, a deputy Iranian foreign minister.
Bagheri-Kani met Mora Tuesday in what signaled the beginning of the process, which is expected to last two or three days. With a wave of criticism in Tehran from critics of the 2015 deal and pundits generally cautious, IRNA has offered no information on these initial contacts.
Joseph Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief tweeted that “my team is as of today in Doha to coordinate and facilitate indirect exchanges between US and Iranian negotiators.” Borrell used the phrase “proximity talks.”
Reuters news agency last week cited an Iranian and European official that Tehran had signaled it might drop a demand for its Revolutionary Guards to be removed from the US list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ There have for weeks been suggestions from analysts that the issue, which is contentious in both Tehran and Washington, could be kicked into the long grass.
Borrell, in a trip to Tehran accompanied by Mora, announced at the weekend a new phase in talks, which had up to mid-March been based in Vienna and involved the remaining JCPOA signatories – China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, and the United Kingdom – with the US, which left the agreement in 2018, taking part indirectly through a team in a separate hotel.
Iran has apparently refused face-to-face talks with the Americans, both within JCPOA structures and the kind of informal contracts that led up to the JCPOA in 2015. Qatar – which has good relations with both Tehran and Washington, and is relatively distanced from JCPOA-opponent Saudi Arabia – has played a quiet role mediating between the two sides.
Mora and Borrell have both expressed guarded optimism over prospects while suggesting substantive issues remained. Mora last week tweeted a picture of himself, Borrell and Malley at dinner, over which the US envoy expressed what Mora called “firm US commitment to come back to the deal.”
In Tehran Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a vice-president under reformist president Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), tweeted that “opportunities can go as quickly as passing clouds.”
The meeting signals the start of indirect talks between Iran and the United States to resolve their outstanding differences for restoring the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA.
Mora has been the EU coordinator in the nuclear negotiations, that lasted 11 months in the Austrian capital Vienna and now are set to resume between Tehran and Washington in Doha.
The complicated negotiations aimed to restore the JCPOA that former US President Donald Trump abandoned in May 2018.
IRNA has so far not offered any details of what discussed between the Iranian and EU diplomats.
During a trip last weekend to Tehran the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell agreed with Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian to resume talks with the US, but the two sides changed the venue to Qatar.
The talks in Vienna came to a standstill in March apparently on Iran’s demand asking the US to remove its Revolutionary Guard from Washington’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The Biden Administration has so far not accepted the demand, but Iran has agreed to resume indirect talks with EU mediation.
With the change of venue, Russia and China, signatories of the JCPOA, apparently will not be present in the talks.
On June 28, 1981, a bomb hidden in the microphone, or the audio system, exploded at a meeting of the Islamic Republican Party killing around 70 top officials of the new revolutionary government. The chief prize for whoever was behind the plot was ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, seen at the time as the number two figure after the founder of the clerical regime, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Beheshti died.
The Supreme Leader paid his utmost respects to Beheshti in his speech, but introduced him as a top judicial official, not as the powerful figure he was at the time.
Khamenei reminisced the tough months in the summer of 1981, when the Mujahedin organization (MEK) and a variety of leftist and Marxist groups challenged Khomeini and the Islamic Republic.
“They threw everything they had at us,” but the regime survived and has continued to survive for four decades, the aging leader boasted.
Indeed, the regime has survived, but Khamenei did not mention the methods used for survival. For one, he failed to mention the hundreds of people executed right after the revolution, all without a real trial, including Amir-Abbas Hoveida, the long-time prime minister during the monarchy, who had no trace of financial corruption and was known for his diligent pursuit of economic development.
Khamenei also failed to mention the jailing of thousands of MEK members and other leftists in the 1980s, and Khomeini’s decision to massacre them in prisons while they were serving their sentences. Around 5,000 prisoners were killed in 1988 in a matter of 30 days.
He also did not mention the ‘chain murders’ of intellectuals in the early 1990s and the thousands of journalists, dissidents and ordinary people killed during protests or use of excessive force by the government in the three decades since.
Khamenei also claimed in his speech that Islamic Republic’s enemies have been looking for its demise for more than four decades, seeing signs of weakness as potential good news, but they have been disappointed.
“The enemy cannot understand that in this world, other than political calculations, there are also other considerations, which are God’s rules and traditions,” he said. Khamenei has been reinforcing his legitimacy by claiming that he is the highest Shiite authority on earth, and it is the hand of God that has secured his rule.
Khamenei also did not mention Iran’s economic decline since 1979, especially in the past 15 years as his foreign policy and nuclear program have brought about devastating sanctions. The currency rial has fallen by close to 4,500-fold since 1978, from 70 rials to the dollar to over 300,000.
Facing serious economic problems and continuing anti-government protests, he called on his followers to stick with “God’s rules”, meaning “jihad” to defend the regime.
He then repeated worn-out slogans, such as fighting corruption, while just this week news emerged about another massive embezzlement case of more than $700 million dollars in animal feed imports.
Khamenei also asked the hardliner judiciary, which is controlled by him, to deal with cyperspace to protect "people's psychological peace", implicitly encouraging a push by his followers to restrict access to the Internet.