World watching, Haley says of Iran, protests
UNITED NATIONS — A U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the protests roiling Iran showed Tehran “the world will be watching” its actions, the U.S. ambassador said Friday.
At the same time, Russia and some other countries said the international community had no business weighing in on the demonstrations.
The U.S. called the meeting after giving moral support to the anti-government protesters in a week of demonstrations and counterdemonstrations.
U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his administration have praised the anti-government demonstrators as people stand-
ing up to a repressive and corrupt regime that is trying to silence them.
“The world should applaud their courage” and amplify their message, said U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, portraying the protests as a human-rights issue that could spill over into an international problem. “The Iranian regime is now on notice: The world will be watching what you do.”
But Russia and Iran complained that the U.S. was dragging the U.N.’s most powerful body into what they called a domestic matter.
“The United States is abusing the platform of the Security Council,” said Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, whose country has close ties to Iran. “Let Iran deal with its own problems.”
Envoys from several other countries, from China to newcomer Equatorial Guinea, expressed reservations about whether the council was the right forum for the issue.
Still, the U.N. charter empowers the council to “investigate any dispute, or any situation which might lead to international friction,” and the U.S. wasn’t alone in thinking the Iranian protests qualified.
“It is right and proper — indeed, our responsibility … to assess whether a situation like this could become a threat to international peace and security,” British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said before the meeting.
Back in the U.S., Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in an interview Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration is working with key lawmakers on a legislative fix that could enable the United States to remain in the Iran nuclear deal, which has been seen increasingly under threat from Trump.
The changes to the law codifying the U.S.’ participation in the 2015 agreement could come as early as next week or shortly thereafter, Tillerson said. Trump faces a series of deadlines in the coming days about how to proceed with an accord he describes as terrible and too soft on Iran.
While the talks involving the White House, the State Department and Congress wouldn’t increase restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activity, as Trump also wants, they could strengthen the way the U.S. enforces the agreement, perhaps convincing Trump that it’s worthwhile for the U.S. to stay in it.
“The president said he is either going to fix it or cancel it,” Tillerson said. “We are in the process of trying to deliver on the promise he made to fix it.”
Several countries — including U.S. allies France and the United Kingdom — used Friday’s Security Council meeting to defend the nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers.
After criticizing Iran’s ballistic missile development and role in supporting Yemeni rebels, Rycroft said, “The U.K. remains fully commit- ted” to the accord. “We encourage all member states to uphold all their commitments. A prosperous, stable Iran is beneficial to all.”
Ending the nuclear accord “would be a major setback for the entire international community,” French envoy Francois Delattre said, adding that “the agreement is one of the cornerstones of stability in the Middle East as a whole.”
Trump faces a series of key decisions on Iran starting next week — including whether to honor part of the 2015 agreement that lifted restrictions on Iran’s banking, oil and shipping industries. He could opt to reimpose the sanctions and risk collapse of the accord, a move that Friday’s U.N. session showed would leave the U.S. isolated.
Haley, who did not mention the nuclear accord Friday, focused her remarks on the protests that have killed at least 21 people and led to hundreds of arrests. She said the demonstrations were a “spontaneous expression of fundamental human rights” against an “oppressive government” that prioritizes militias and terror groups abroad over its own people.
“The Iranian people are calling out, ‘Think of us!’” Haley said, echoing a chant heard at some protests.
Up to 42,000 people took part in the protests, according to Iran’s interior minister. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people have attended pro-government rallies in recent days. Authorities say the anti-government protests are waning.
Delattre urged a careful approach to weighing in on the protests: “Yes, of course, to vigilance and call for full respect of freedom of expression, but no to instrumentalization of the crisis from the outside — because it would only reinforce the extremes, which is precisely what we want to avoid,” he said before the meeting.
Iran’s prosecutor general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, alleged Thursday that an American CIA official was the “main designer” of the demonstrations. And Iranian Ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo — whose country isn’t a Security Council member but was invited to participate Friday — said the protests had gotten “direct encouragement by foreign forces, including by the president of the United States.”
In Tehran, a hard-line cleric leading Friday prayers expanded the blame to include popular international messaging apps, calling on the Islamic Republic to build its own social media.
After the protests spread across the country, the government suspended access to the messaging app Telegram, which was being used to publicize the protests. The app boasts an estimated 48 million users in Iran, more than half the population.
The government also briefly blocked the Instagram photo-sharing site. Twitter and Facebook were already banned.
With travel restricted across Iran, a nation of 80 million people roughly 2½ times the size of Texas, online videos and images posted by activists have provided some of the only glimpses into the demonstrations, the largest in nearly a decade, which have mainly been held in the provinces.
Such images provide only a limited view of events on the ground and can be easily manipulated. All of Iran’s radio and television stations are state-run.
“Cyberspace was kindling the fire of the battle,” Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told thousands of worshippers gathered in Tehran. “When cyberspace was closed down, the sedition was stopped. The nation does not support a social network that has its key in the hands of the United States.”
The Trump administration has denied having any hand in the demonstrations, saying they arose completely spontaneously. The CIA declined to comment.
The president has, however, tweeted to commend the protests.
Trump expressed “such respect for the people of Iran as they try to take back their corrupt government” and pledged “great support from the United States.” He also has described Iran as “failing at every level” and declared in all capital letters that it is “time for change!” Information for this article was contributed by Jennifer Peltz and Nasser Karimi of The Associated Press; and by Kambiz Foroohar of Bloomberg News.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in an interview Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration is working with key lawmakers on a legislative fix that could enable the United States to remain in the Iran nuclear deal, which has been seen increasingly under threat from Trump.