Soliven greets Iranian ambassador

STAR publisher andchairman Max V. Soliven greeted Iranian Ambassador Gholamreza Yousefi yesterday on the occasion of his country’s national day and 23rd anniversary of the Victory of the Islamic Revolution of Iran.

The affair held in the grand ballroom of the Dusit Hotel Nikko in Makati commemorated the date the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on Feb. 11, 1979, proclaimed an Islamic Republic in Tehran after the former ruler, Mohammed Shah Reza Pahlevi was overthrown and fled the country on Jan. 16.

Although in Tehran yesterday a large rally assailed US President Geroge W. Bush’s attack on Iran (in his State of the Union address) as belonging to an "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea, it also indicated the struggle going on between Iranian President Ayatollah Mohammed Khatemi’s reformers and "modernists" and the conservative Mullahs and hardliners who still control the majority in the Majlis, the Parliament.

It still puzzles even America’s European allies why Bush lumped Iran and Iraq together in his "axis" speech, since the two states remain sworn enemies of each other, having fought a long and costly war with each other from Sept. 17, 1980, until a United Nations brokered "ceasefire" on Aug. 20, 1988.

Ambassador Gholamreza also reminded Soliven yesterday that Iran had accepted more than two million Afghan refugees from the former Taliban regime of Afghanistan and had supported the "Northern Alliance" which resisted, then overthrew the Taliban, with American aerial and other military support. He also denied that the 50 tons of weapons, rockets, explosives and ammunition intercepted last month by Israeli naval patrol craft being smuggled by ship to Palestinian radicals had come from the Iranians.