A Diplomatic Face Seeks to Counter Iran’s Critics

Mohammad Javad Larijani never finished his mathematics studies at Berkeley. Instead, he became one of the quotable, English-speaking, official defenders of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

He was a 29-year-old graduate student in 1979, with an office that overlooked the San Francisco Bay, when he abruptly dropped his dissertation work and left the University of California, Berkeley, to return home, where revolutionary clerics were overthrowing the shah’s American-backed government. The son of an important ayatollah, Mr. Larijani became a prominent member of the new Islamic government, which valued him for his conservative religious upbringing and his fluency in the language of the country his contemporaries were calling the Great Satan.

Now 61, Mr. Larijani is still engaged in the work of seeking to rebut Iran’s critics, conducting a public-relations battle through overseas panel debates, newspaper interviews and television appearances. He has calmly faced questioning by journalists like Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour.

Whether he has succeeded in altering any American opinions about Iran is questionable. But even Mr. Larijani’s critics say he has a smooth, urbane delivery and a rational demeanor that contrast with the bombast of some other Iranian leaders who rage against the United States.

“He is someone who is quite often used as the diplomatic face of Iran,” said Hadi Ghaemi, head of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group based in New York, who has no fondness for Mr. Larijani and has verbally dueled with him. “He is very well versed in putting Iran in a good light.”

Mr. Larijani also is a member of an extremely powerful conservative religious family in Iran, whose brothers include the speaker of the Parliament and the head of the judiciary.

With his current title of secretary general of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, Mr. Larijani was in New York recently for meetings at the United Nations, where he sought to repudiate a report by the special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, who said the Iranian government had engaged in a “pattern of systemic violations” of citizens’ rights. But he also found himself on the receiving end of many other questions, including new suspicions raised by a United Nations report about Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian antipathy toward Israel and its increasingly acrimonious tensions with the United States, highlighted by accusations of an Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington.

Mr. Larijani says Iran’s nuclear work is peaceful and a proud national accomplishment, the United Nations report is a joke, Israel is a project that has failed, the Saudi plot accusation is fantasy fiction and the United States needs to accept that Iran is a different type of democracy.

If Mr. Larijani harbored hope that the estranged American-Iranian relationship could be improved, it was not evident, at least compared with the view he had once expressed, as a deputy foreign minister in the 1980s, that there could be a thaw. Now, after more than 30 years of vilification by a succession of American administrations, Mr. Larijani said, mistrust of Iranian intentions seems to be ingrained.

“They are paranoid about the Iranian government, and not only the government, the creation of the Islamic republic of Iran,” he said in an interview at Iran’s mission to the United Nations. “It has led to a situation that takes for granted that Iran is a major threat, and for both Democrats and Republicans, the problem is how to deal with the threat. I think the basic assumption is flawed.”

He expressed irritation that “the United States does not admire or encourage or evaluate this democracy that we built in Iran.” Critics of Iran maintain that it is no democracy, but has morphed into a police state that under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stifled free expression, rigged the last presidential election, and imprisoned, abused and even killed opponents.

Mr. Larijani said that view of Iran was also a fiction, and a symptom of what he called the false American assumption that Iranians want a change in their government. Mr. Larijani, as well as other Iranian officials, has contended that the United States was partly responsible for encouraging the deadly unrest that followed the 2009 re-election of Mr. Ahmadinejad, which his opponents regarded as a fraud.

“The United States should put away this idea of regime change, or the language of threat to Iran,” Mr. Larijani said. “This is definitely not producing any result.”

He expressed deep disappointment in President Obama, who had promised to reach out to Iran. “I had much more hope in Obama to bring change, but he failed drastically,” Mr. Larijani said. “I don’t know why.”

In the Obama administration’s view, it is Iran that has failed; it points to Mr. Obama’s effort to communicate with Ayatollah Khamenei via private letters that elicited no response.

Mr. Larijani’s critics contend that he is a clever politician who knows how to navigate the system in Iran and has no legal training and little grounding in human rights issues. The appointment to his current post was regarded cynically by rights advocates, who attributed it to the Larijani family’s influence and fealty to Ayatollah Khamenei.

“He looks at human rights politically,” said Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist who was once imprisoned in Iran and now lives in the United States. “He’s calculating. He’s not there to defend values and principles. He’s there to promote the government’s ideology.”

While Mr. Larijani contends that such criticism validates his argument that Iran is a victim of American propaganda, he says he harbors no antagonism toward the United States. He even expressed a bit of nostalgia for the Berkeley campus.

“I used to look at the Golden Gate and do math. That was my habit,” he said. “And after finishing work, I used to go to Sproul Plaza and see all kinds of people around there.”

Source: NYTimes