Hard Times for Iran’s Foreign Minister

Mr Javad Zarif

By Alireza Bahrami

TEHRAN: Javad Zarif is a famous Iranian diplomat. He has been Iran’s representative to the UN for many years. He has also been the foreign minister of President Rouhani’s government for the past eight years.

Mr. Zarif, along with Secretary of State John Kerry of the President Obama administration and the foreign ministers of five other countries, spent months negotiating Iran’s nuclear program. Those negotiations made Zarif a world-renowned peace diplomat.

President Rouhani’s government was under intense pressure from the right wing for those negotiations. Although President Trump canceled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Javad Zarif was cited as a serious option for Iran’s 2021 presidential election.

But these days, leaking an audio file has made the situation much more difficult for Javad Zarif. This audio file is related to an oral history interview conducted at the Iranian Government Research Center.

In this interview, Mr. Zarif spoke about the fact that a political faction close to the Iranian military did not agree with the agreement between Iran and the West. He also spoke about the Russian government’s support for Iran’s right-wing faction. This audio file was released by one of the Persian-language networks abroad that opposes the Iranian government.

Opponents of President Rouhani’s government reacted sharply to the remarks. They were particularly angry at the subtle remarks about the famous Iranian general who was assassinated at the Baghdad airport on the orders of then US President Donald Trump.

But proponents of the current Iranian government’s policies believe that the publication of these remarks will improve Mr. Zarif’s position in Iranian public opinion.

Iran’s foreign minister was under pressure to resign over the disclosure of the audio file.

On Sunday, the Supreme Leader of Iran also spoke about this issue in his speech. He criticized Mr. Zarif without mentioning him. Iranian right-wingers said after the speech that the Iranian foreign minister has to resign. But the opposite faction believed that the Iranian leader’s remarks in this speech were in fact a confirmation of the foreign minister’s main focus.

With these conditions, we have to wait and see if Mr. Zarif will remain in the cabinet until the end of the current Iranian government, at the end of the summer. Will he be able to run for the next Iranian presidency in the next few weeks?