Former Iranian Consul in Oslo, Mohammad Reza Heydari to Al Aan TV: Iran's Foreign Policy Aims at Creating Conflicts within Arab Countries and around t

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Friday, October 1st 2010 [ME NewsWire]:

Iranian defected diplomat Mohammed Reza Heydari declared that the priorities of Iranian foreign diplomacy are to create crisis in the world, especially in neighboring countries and the Middle East, to serve its interests. Heydari's comments came in Akthar Min Anwan weekly current affairs show on Al Aan TV, the Dubai-based pan Arab satellite channel.


Mohammed Reza Heydari, the former Iranian Consul in Oslo, who resigned his post in January 2010, considered that “the government is turning Iran into a big prison due to its totalitarian practices.” He stressed that Iranians are “suffering from the lack of freedom particularly in the press, which made it rank the second country in confining journalists and limiting their freedom.”


During the interview, Mohammad Reza Heydari uncovered that there are persistent communications between him and other anti-government figures in addition to officials within the regime. They discuss several projects, among which is establishing the “Green Embassy”.


Mohammed Reza Heydari said that “the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad poses a threat to the region and the world, and he lied when he proclaimed that sanctions didn't severely damage the Iranian economy and this is just one of many lies of Tehran’s government.”


Hossein Shariatmadari, managing director of Keyhan, an Iranian conservative newspaper, described the defected diplomats as “mice” and boasted that they can return back to Iran without fearing for their lives.


In parallel of discussing the Iranian policy and its implications on the Arab world, Al Aan TV has conducted a poll with Dubai’s YouGov Siraj to understand the public opinion on the same issue. The results found that Arab citizens generally believe that Iran plays an intrusive role in the internal affairs of Arab countries. The statistics showed that 68% of citizens in the GCC and 62% of North Africans and 63% of Egyptians agree that such a role is dominant. When asked about the effects of the Iranian interference in Iraq and its consequences, 65% of the respondents from the GCC region, 47% from Egypt, and 39% from North Africa believe that the Iranian policy would lead to influential control on the Iraqi government and possibly trigger a civil war.


Also nearly half of the citizens in the GCC, North Africa, and Egypt strongly believe that Iran is intervening in Lebanese and Palestinian affairs.


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