To Washington's Dismay, UAE Hosts Assad
Washington has sharply rebuked Abu Dhabi for hosting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Friday, saying his visit was an apparent attempt to legitimize him.
Washington has sharply rebuked Abu Dhabi for hosting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Friday, saying his visit was an apparent attempt to legitimize him.
The unexpected one-day visit was Assad’s first to any Arab country since Syria’s civil war started in 2011 when his opponents began protests against the authoritarian rule of the family.
The United Arab Emirates once backed rebels fighting Assad’s forces, but in recent months there have been signs of warming relations, showing that the Persian Gulf US ally is pursuing a very different policy from that of Washington.
The State Department said on Friday it was "profoundly disappointed and troubled" by what it called an apparent attempt to legitimize Assad.
The timing of the trip coincided with the eleventh anniversary of the Syrian uprising, at a time when Washington has been working worldwide to unite allies and partners against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Assad is a close ally of Moscow, which intervened in Syria’s civil war in 2015 with air power in coordination with Iran that supplied ground troops to crush the rebels.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price reiterated that Washington remains opposed to efforts to normalize ties or rehabilitate Assad. He said the United States will not waive or lift sanctions on Syria unless progress is made toward a political solution to the conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people since spiraling out of an uprising against Assad.
"We urge states considering engagement with the Assad regime to weigh carefully the horrific atrocities visited by the regime on the Syrians over the last decade, as well as the regime's continuing efforts to deny much of the country access to humanitarian aid and security," Price said in an email, Reuters reported.
Washington had expressed concern in November when the UAE foreign minister visited Damascus and met Assad.
But the Biden administration has eroded its political capital with both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi by not heeding their concerns about regional rival Iran, ending its support for their war in Yemen and slapping conditions on US weapons sales to the Gulf states.
Although Abu Dhabi has not commented much about US negotiations with Iran to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement known as JCPOA, but it has been very clear that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE regard the deal as inadequate to contain Iran’s missile and proxy threats in the region.
The UAE has also established closer ties with Israel since the landmark establishment of diplomatic relation in 2020. It is believed that the two countries share intelligence and cooperate against what they see as Iranian threats.
The UAE has also stayed neutral in the Ukraine crisis, saying a peaceful resolution is more important than taking sides, reflecting its close ties with Moscow. While it voted for a United Nations General Assembly resolution against Russia’s invasion, it abstained in a similar vote at the Security Council, which carried more weight.
In addition for a desire to protect its security amid misgivings about the Biden administration, the UAE also cares about its cooperation with Russia in the OPEC+ arrangement, where oil supplies have been controlled by major producers to avoid a sharp fall that occurred in 2014.
UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan who visited Moscow on Thursday said his government is keen to cooperate with Moscow on improving energy security.
To show their displeasure with Washington both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have resisted boosting supplies after the Russian invasion, but they have to walk a line between the West and Russia.
Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh who was the chairman of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee added that although Russia pretended to be protecting Iran in some of the challenges Tehran faced, but Moscow has taken away Iran's opportunity for cooperation with Europe.
He was referring to the history of Tehran-Moscow ties since 2003 when Iran was engaged in nuclear talks with Europe. Falahatpisheh claimed that during this period, the Russians prevented Iran from cooperation with Europe in the areas of energy and establishing gas pipelines to Europe.
In an interview with Etemad Online published on Friday, the conservative politician said that the world is now confronting Russia and Iran should seize this opportunity to reclaim a stronger position in the energy market. This has been consistent with other remarks the senior politician has made recently, calling for direct talks with the United States.
On the issue of Ukraine, Falahatpisheh argued that the West may have to retreat to an extent: "One of the solutions to the problem is that the West including the United States should accept Russia's demand for stopping the eastbound expansion of NATO. Doing so, will, of course, be a defeat for NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program."
Falahatpisheh explained that the PfP, which was formed in 1994, is a program of practical bilateral cooperation between individual Euro-Atlantic partner countries and NATO, which allows partners to build up an individual relationship with NATO, choosing their own priorities for cooperation. Based on this program NATO shifted from its defensive nature to an offensive position, Falahatpisheh said.
He said that Russia in the meantime used international economic dynamics to establish its position as the world's energy highway. He added that that Russia in this period “robbed Iran of opportunities to cooperate with Europe” in supplying energy adding that Moscwow followed the same policy toward Iran's other economic activities.
Falahatpisheh observed that while Iran has the world's second largest natural gas reserves, it holds only one percent of international gas trade. He added that the world is now thirsty for natural gas and Iran should gain markets around the world instead of allowing Russia to waste its time.
Stressing that "Russia's opportunism took advantage of Iran's challenges with the West, it is now time for Iran to seize the opportunity of the war in Ukraine, solve its problems with the West and regain its position in the global energy market."
Meanwhile, Iran’s Friday Prayer Imams, receiving central guidance for their Friday sermons, continued to use Ukraine’s invasion to bash the United States and claim the West has abandoned the Ukrainians.
Qazvin’s Imam Abdolkarim Abedini using the occasion to unleash an attack on the US said that Washington has abandoned its own “vassal”, the president of Ukraine, “the same way it abandoned, the Shah, Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein.” He added that Americans want to disarm Iran the same way they took away Ukraine’s nuclear weapons (in 1990s).
Others repeated the official government line that the US is responsible for provoking the war, not even mentioning Russia.
The only minor exception was a sentence uttered by Mohammad Hossein Aboutorabi Fard who led Tehran's Friday prayers on March 18. He said: "We are sorry for the people of Ukraine, and we never welcome war and invasion."
However, Aboutorabi called the wave of international sympathy “shedding alligator tears for Ukraine.”
In a statement, ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said the latest report of UN special rapporteur Javaid Rehman on the situation of human rights in Iran to the UN Human Rights Council was "full of one-sided and incorrect information and conclusions" and contained allegations based on misinformation received from "hostile sources".
In the report Rehman highlighted the situation of American, British, French, German, Austrian, and Swedish prisoners in Iran, several of whom were convicted by Revolutionary Courts on vague security charges after trials that did not meet international standards of due process.
The accused in such cases often cannot choose their defense attorneys. Trials take place behind closed doors, and duration of detentions before trial are arbitrary. International human rights organizations have documented numerous instances of violations.
Iran released two British-Iranian detainees on Wednesday after the payment of an old $530 debt to Iran but Iran's foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian denied there was any connection between the payment and the release of the two detainees who spent several years in prison on charges of spying.
International organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention have for years said Iran's security forces were targeting Iranian dual citizens and foreign nationals, charging them with cooperating with "hostile' states without revealing any evidence, and sentencing them after trials that violated their right to due process.”
According to Rehman's report, in 2021 Iran executed at least 280 individuals, including at least 10 women and three juvenile offenders who were convicted of crimes committed before they reached the age of 18.
Rehman, a professor at Brunel University, has not visited Iran since he was appointed in 2018, because Iran has banned UN and other human rights investigators from visiting the country.
“We condemn the application of double standards by Western countries and the instrumental use of the concept of human rights as well as the silence and inaction of countries that claim to be advocates of these rights” in the face of human rights violations by certain countries, Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi said Monday.
After Saudi Arabia’s execution of 81 prisoners in the largest mass execution by the kingdom in modern history over “terror-related offenses", Kazem Gharibabadi, the secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, also criticized Western countries for using human rights to put pressure on non-aligned countries but not their allies such as Saudi Arabia.
As in his previous quarterly reports, in his latest report to the forty-ninth session of the UN Human Rights Council Rehman urged Iran to immediately abolish the death penalty for all offences through legislation.
Pending abolition, he urged the authorities to impose an immediate moratorium on executions and commute all death sentences, amend legislation to prohibit the execution of persons who committed a crime while under the age of 18 years and for offences that do not amount to the most serious crimes under international human rights law.
He also urged protection of prisoners and detainees from all forms of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment and ensuring that confessions are not obtained through torture or ill-treatment, revise legislation to eliminate child marriage, and improve conditions in prisons.