Iran accuses US of ‘brazen’ plan to change its government

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Iran’s envoy to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshroo speaks during a Security Council meeting after a vote on the Iran resolution at the UN headquarters in New York on July 20, 2015. The UN Security Council on July 20, unanimously adopted a resolution that will clear a path for international sanctions crippling Iran’s economy to be lifted. On condition that Iran respects the agreement to the letter, seven UN resolutions passed since 2006 to sanction Iran will be gradually terminated, according to the text.

Iran is accusing U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of “a brazen interventionist plan” to change the current government that violates international law and the U.N. Charter.

Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres circulated Tuesday that Tillerson’s comments are also “a flagrant violation” of the 1981 Algiers Accords in which the United States pledged “not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.”

Tillerson said in a June 14 hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the 2018 State Department budget that U.S. policy is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons “and work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.”

“Those elements are there, certainly as we know,” he said.

Kohshroo said Iran expects all countries to condemn “such grotesque policy statements and advise the government of the United States to act responsibly and to adhere to the principles of the (U.N.) Charter and international law.”

He noted that Tillerson’s comments came weeks after President Hassan Rouhani’s re-election to another four-year term and local elections in which 71 percent of the Iranian people participated. Rouhani is a political moderate who defeated a hardline opponent.

“The people of Iran have repeatedly proven that they are the ones to decide their own destiny and thus attempts by the United States to interfere in Iranian domestic affairs will be doomed to failure,” Kohshroo said. “They have learned how to stand strong and independent, as demonstrated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.”