jpv. During its meeting of 17 May 2016 the Iranian Parliament with 181 votes out of a total of 216 adopted a bill which requires the government to initiate legal action against the United States for restitution of damages.
In support of this action, several events were mentioned this morning for which the United States were said to be responsible. These include US participation in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 as well as the deaths of hundreds of Iranians during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. They also include the US support of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, the downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf in 1988 and the destruction of two oil platforms in April of the same year.
The newspaper “Tehran Times” reported that the Iranian Vice-President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Majid Ansari, estimated the “moral and material damage” caused by the “enemy activity” of the United States at 50 billion dollars. Because of this, relations between the United States and Iran have been tense for 66 years.
This claim for compensation is to be seen in the context of two recent US demands on Iran.
Mid-march 2016, a US court sentenced Iran to pay $ 10.5 billion as compensation for the attacks of 11 September 2001. Tehran has rejected this conviction as “unfounded” and “ridiculous”.
The US court attributed its decision to the assertion that Iran had not sufficiently proved its non-involvement in the terrorist network al-Qaeda’s attacks. After the attacks on the New York towers, the US had accused Iran repeatedly of having links to al-Qaeda. However, these allegations were never proved. Experts also point out that the Shiite Iran is a declared enemy of the Sunni al-Qaeda.
The Secretary General of Iran’s Human Rights Council, Mohammed Javad Larijani, said, in allusion to Saudi Arabia: “If someone has to be sentenced for the attacks, then there are US allies in the region that have created and financed al-Qaeda.”
Additionally, the United States Supreme Court ordered Iran to pay $ 2 billion on 20 April 2016. This money was meant to be to the benefit of the families of the 241 victims who died in the bombing of 1983 in a US military base in Beirut. In accordance with this court decision, this sum would be paid from the Central Bank of Iran moneys frozen in the US.
President Hassan Rouhani called this decision an “obvious theft” and “a great shame” for American justice. •
Sources: www.lematin.ch, francais.rt.com, www.deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de
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