‘Negotiations at gunpoint meaningless’

threats is meaningless.
“We don’t want relations with the US when it impairs our country’s independence,” Haddad Adel said in the south-western city of Ahwaz yesterday.

He further reiterated the remarks of the late founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, who said “when they point a gun at your head, negotiation is meaningless”.

The United States and Iran broke diplomatic relations in April 1980, after Iranian students seized the United States’ espionage centre at its embassy in .

The two countries have had tense relations ever since. Iran has been under Washington sanctions after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled a US-backed monarch in the country.

The two countries’ relations deteriorated following Iran’s progress in the field of civilian nuclear technology. Washington and its Western allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear programme, while they have never presented any corroborative evidence to substantiate their allegations. Iran denies the charges and insists that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only.

Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry.

Also during the 2009 post-election events in Iran, Iranian officials found a number of documents as well as a series of confessions extracted from the detainees substantiating US attempts to stoke unrest in the country. — Fars News Agency.