Iran’s supreme leader has warned his long-suffering people to prepare for more isolation from the West, doubling down on a confrontational message in the wake of last week’s air crash and America’s assassination of his favourite general.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led Friday prayers in person for the first time in eight years in a sign of the significance of the crisis the country is facing. Addressing a crowd at Tehran University, he made no concessions to his critics or to protesters who have filled the streets in the week since the Revolutionary Guard accidentally shot down a passenger jet, killing all 176 people on board.
“The plane crash was a bitter accident, and burnt our heart,” he said. “But some tried to portray it in such a way as to overshadow the death the great martyrdom and sacrifice of [Qasem] Soleimani. The enemy became so happy with the unintentional downing of the plane because they thought that they had found a pretext to destroy Iran’s face. They will certainly fail.”
He said that the answer to the West’s hostility to the Islamic Republic was not to put trust in Europe, let alone America, but to become strong both militarily and economically — in effect, an instruction to Iranians to tighten their belts in the face of deepening sanctions.
He gave strong backing to the Revolutionary Guard, despite the air crash, and to its international arm, the Quds Force, dashing the hopes of many protesters that he would rein them in to focus on rebuilding Iran’s shattered economy. Iran’s security depended on “resistance” to Israel and the US, he said.
President Rouhani, the leading “moderate” survivor in the Islamic Republic’s hierarchy, was shown on live television coverage sitting stony-faced in the front row. He has been the subject of bitter attacks from the Revolutionary Guard’s hardline supporters.
Iran has been in turmoil since Mr Trump’s assassination of Soleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad Airport in the early hours of January 3.
The Revolutionary Guard retaliated by firing a volley of missiles five nights later at two bases in Iraq housing American troops, but in the tension of the following hours, as the world waited to see if the US would strike back, a Revolutionary Guard anti-aircraft missile battery downed the Ukrainian Airlines jet.
By then Soleimani had been buried amid huge crowds of mourners, who filled the streets of major Iranian cities for state-sponsored memorials. In the wake of the crash, and the regime’s attempts to deny the Revolutionary Guard’s responsibility for three days, more crowds came out this week demanding that the ayatollah resign. In some cases they tore down posters showing Soleimani’s face.
Ayatollah Khamenei referred to these incidents but said that they represented only a minority of people. “The few hundred who insulted the picture of General Soleimani, are they the people of Iran, or this million-strong crowd in the streets?” he said.
There had been rumours in advance that the ayatollah would use the speech to undermine Mr Rouhani. In a move little reported abroad, a large number of pro-Rouhani MPs were this week banned from standing again in next month’s parliamentary elections.
The ayatollah refrained from personal attacks but did refer to arguments he has previously made that attempts to deal with European leaders as a counterbalance to American hostility which Mr Rouhani has promoted in the past, had failed.
He said that US officials who pretended that they were “standing up for the Iranian people” — an apparent reference to a recent tweet by President Trump — were “clowns”. But he said that by failing to face down Mr Trump over sanctions, EU leaders had shown that they were slaves of the US.
EU leaders had promised to find a way to enable trade with Iran to continue after Mr Trump reimposed sanctions but failed to do so, and this week they announced that they could seek to declare Iran in default of the 2015 deal for its resumption of uranium enrichment.
The ayatollah said that Iran would now have to become more economically independent, including by weaning itself off its reliance on income from oil. Iran’s greatest local enemy, Saudi Arabia, is also struggling to cope economically with a reduction in oil income.(COURTESY THE TIMES)
