U.S. announces 'new beginning' on Iran

Iran ready to change if U.S. leads way: Khamenei

EU welcomes Obama’s message to Iran

Morocco cuts ties with Iran, accuses Tehran of cultural infiltration

U.S. President Barack Obama issued an unprecedented videotaped appeal to Iran offering a "new beginning" of diplomatic engagement to turn the page on decades of U.S. policy toward America's longtime foe.

"My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties," Obama said in a message released to select broadcast outlets in the Middle East timed for the Nowruz holiday celebration in Iran.

Calling for a fundamental change in US behavior, he said sanctions were "wrong and need to be reviewed".

In his video Obama acknowledged the history of strained relations and set out an alternative vision of "renewed exchanges among our people and greater opportunities for partnership and commerce".

He said Washington wanted "the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations". But he also said: "You have that right but it comes with real responsibilities and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization."

Obama went further than he has since taking office on January 20 in extending an olive branch to Tehran, which has been locked in disputes with Washington over its nuclear ambitions.

Obama told Iranians: “You too have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right, but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.”

Significantly, reflecting what Obama’s advisers regard as only a cautious first step by the President to try to get the two sides talking, he did not mention any of the issues dividing the two countries: Iran’s nuclear program, its hostility to Israel and its sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah. He focused instead on what they have in common “in this season of new beginnings”.

Israeli President Shimon Peres sent a rare greeting to the people of Iran, praising what he called a great and ancient culture and saying they would be better off without their hard-line leadership.

The greeting coincided with a video message sent by President Obama to Iran in which he said the U.S. is prepared to end years of strained relations if Tehran tones down its bellicose rhetoric.

"I turn to the noble Iranian nation in the name of the ancient Jewish nation and wish that it return to its rightful place among developed nations," he said.

"It's such a rich country with such a rich culture," he added. "On the one hand I look at Iran with admiration because of its history and on the other hand with sorrow because of what's happened to it."

Peres' blessing for the Persian Nowruz holiday was broadcast on the Farsi-language service of the Voice of Israel radio station. The station claims to have several million listeners in Iran, though it was not immediately clear how many people had heard the message.

In his aired greeting, Peres turned his focus to the Iranian people and offered a Nowruz blessing.

"Our relations with the Iranian nation knew days of prosperity, even in modern times as we shared with you our experience in agriculture, industry, development of science and medicine and we developed with you the best relations possible," he said.

"To our dismay, our diplomatic relations are at a low point flowing from the desires leading the current leaders of your land to act in every way possible against the state of Israel and its people, but I am confident that the day we are hoping for is not far, when the good neighborly relations and the cooperation will flourish in all fields for the welfare of our nations and for the betterment of our common future."

Iran welcomed US President Barack Obama's olive branch to Tehran but urged him to take concrete steps to repair mistakes that have frozen ties between the two nations for three decades.

"We welcome the wish of the president of the United States to put away past differences," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's press adviser Ali Akbar Javanfekr said in reaction to Obama's message at Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, in which he urged a resolution of differences and an "honest" engagement.

"But the way to do that is not by Iran forgetting the previous hostile and aggressive attitude of the United States," he said. "The American administration has to recognize its past mistakes and repair them."

The United States made another gesture, saying it had a set of next steps planned to encourage dialogue with the Islamic republic.

"Without getting into what next, obviously there will need to be some evaluation overall with our policies," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters in Washington.

In Istanbul on the sidelines of the World Water Forum, Iranian Energy Minister Parviz Fattah also said that Obama's message needed to be followed up by actions.

"The Iranian leaders will precisely assess this message. We believe that we need that in addition to messages we need positive action from Obama as well as from his government," he said.

Javanfekr told AFP that Obama has "not taken any concrete steps to repair the mistakes committed against Iran... If Obama shows willingness to take action, the Iranian government will not show its back to him."

He said Iran wanted to end the "animosities" between the two countries which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980, a year after Iran became an Islamic republic following the toppling of the US-backed shah.

For his part, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the Islamic Republic is ready to reciprocate if US President Barack Obama changes America's attitude toward his country.

"If you change your attitude, we will change our attitude," Khamenei said in a groundbreaking address to thousands of Iranians in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad that was broadcast on state television.

Speaking a day after Obama offered Tehran a "new beginning" to turn back the tide on decades of mutual animosity, Khamenei - the final decision maker on Iranian strategic issues - said, however, that Iran has yet to see any change in Washington's attitude towards Tehran.

"We have no experience with the new American government and the new American president. We will observe them and we will judge," he said.

"We cannot see any change. What is the change in your policy? Did you remove the sanctions? Did you stop supporting the Zionist regime? Tell us what you have changed. We can't see change even in the words of the new American president. Change only in words is not enough. Change must be real," Khamenei said.

"The American leaders and others must know that they can't deceive our nation or scare it." Khamenei accused Washington of having had a "hostile" attitude towards Tehran since the Islamic Revolution toppled the US-backed shah in 1979.

"They supported all the terrorist and opponent groups" against Iran, he said.

"We can see the American hand behind these groups. Unfortunately, this support is still continuing," he said, adding that US-backed groups were aiding rebels fighting Iranian security forces along the Iran-Pakistan border.

"The new American government wants to negotiate. They say to forget the past and are extending their hand. But if it is an iron hand in a velvet glove, it won't have a good meaning," the supreme leader said.

Highlighting the three decades' old animosity, Khamenei said Iran would not forget American support to Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 war between Iran and Iraq or the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 by a US warship that killed all 290 passengers on board.

"In all these years, they carried out hostile propaganda against our country, especially in the past eight years," the powerful cleric said, referring to the tenure of George W. Bush.

In an historic online video message marking the Iranian New Year Nowruz, Obama urged an end to decades of animosity and offered "honest" engagement with the Islamic Republic.

In a decisive break with Bush, Obama called Nowruz celebrations a time of "new beginnings" and said Iran could take its "rightful place" in the world if it renounced terror and embraced peace.

But Khamenei said Obama, in his message, had accused Iran of supporting terrorism.

"He congratulated Iranians for the New Year, but in the same speech he accused Iranians of supporting terrorism and looking for nuclear weapons," Khamenei said.

"We don't know who is taking decisions in the United States. Is it the president, or the Congress, or somebody else? But we are acting logically and not emotionally."

Khamenei also warned that if Washington does not make changes in its policy toward Tehran, it will be more disadvantageous to it than to Iran. "You put sanctions on our country for 30 years but it benefited us and we became stronger. We actually thank the Americans for that," he said.

Iran was quick to welcome, albeit cautiously, U.S. President Barack Obama’s unexpected olive branch to Tehran on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, but called for American action to back up the words of reconciliation.

Iranian Energy Minister Parviz Fattah said that Obama's video message to his country was "positive," while a top adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, "welcomed the wish of the president of the United States to put away past differences."

But both men stressed the need for action to show seriousness toward a new beginning in relations between the two countries, whose ties were severed shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"The Iranian leaders will precisely assess this message," said Fattah on the sidelines of the World Water Forum in Istanbul. "We believe that in addition to messages, we need positive action from Mr. Obama as well as from his government. So in addition to talk, we need actions."

Ahmadinejad's press adviser, Javanfekr, indicated Iranian conditions for a rapprochement, insisting that the Obama administration "has to recognize its past mistakes and repair them as a way to put away the differences."

He told AFP news agency, "If Obama shows willingness to take action, the Iranian government will not show its back to him."

The U.S. State Department announced that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would attend a conference on Afghanistan next week but did not say whether she would meet Iranian officials there.

State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Clinton would be accompanied by U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to the conference, which is set to be held on March 31 in the Dutch city of The Hague.

"The Hague ministerial should reaffirm the solid and long-term commitment of the international community to supporting the government of Afghanistan in shaping a better future for Afghanistan and its people," Wood said.

Clinton and Holbrooke are expected to provide details of a review of U.S. strategy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is set to be released by the Obama administration before the Dutch conference.

Earlier this month, Clinton said Iran's foreign minister also would be invited to attend The Hague conference, setting up her first chance to meet a senior official from Tehran in her new role as top U.S. diplomat.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attended several conferences aimed at stabilizing Iraq, where Iran was also invited.

The Obama administration, in a sign of thawing ties with Iran, is likely soon to relax restrictions on contacts between U.S. diplomats and Iranian officials, said a source close to the matter.

But the source, who asked not to be named because a review of U.S. policy on Iran is not complete, said the Bush administration's idea to open a low-level diplomatic outpost in Tehran was for now "off the table."

The plan is to make small but significant gestures to Tehran, including an invitation to a conference on Afghanistan this month, and to allow U.S. diplomats to see Iranian officials without first seeking approval, as has been the case for nearly 30 years.

"These contacts could be across the board," said the source, adding that the review was not final and that President Barack Obama still had to sign off on it.

Diplomatic sources and analysts said the idea of low to mid-level contacts without first being authorized had been discussed for a while and that this was broadly seen as a first step toward higher-level engagement.

The United States cut off diplomatic ties with Tehran during the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, in which a group of Iranian students held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage at the American Embassy for 444 days.

The Bush administration had been considering opening up a U.S. interests section in Tehran, much as it has in Cuba, but decided to leave this decision up to the next administration.

Having an interest section would stop well short of full diplomatic relations but it would involve sending U.S. diplomats to Tehran for the first time in 30 years.

Diplomats and the source close to the discussions on the issue, said the Obama administration's policy review on Iran, which is expected to be complete in the coming weeks, no longer had this option on the table. The Obama administration would like to lay the groundwork for such a move first and any decision on that was unlikely at least until after Iran's June elections.

Meanwhile, Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami has called on all opposition groups to unite in order to replace President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the upcoming elections, the ISNA news agency reported.

‘The society has reached a juncture in which all (political groups) should try to change the political status quo,’ Khatami told a group of reformists in Teheran.

‘Change is the most urgent necessity and anyone who can enable this change should be supported,’ added Khatami, a fierce opponent of Ahmadinejad’s policies.

Khatami quit the presidential race to support former prime minister Mir-Hossein Moussavi in the June 12 elections.

As Khatami vowed to support Moussavi, the top opposition candidate vowed to continue the reform course of the former president.

With the economic crisis on top of the Iranian people’s minds, the opposition groups decided to give priority to Moussavi, who is known for his skills as crisis manager when prime minister at the time of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and for his links with the country’s trade unions.

Ahmadinejad has failed to implement economic reforms and fulfill his promises to improve the living standards of middle- and low-income Iranians.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy welcomed as ‘good news’ a video message from US President Barack Obama reaching out to Iran.

‘It’s rather good news,’ Sarkozy told reporters after a European Union summit in Brussels. ‘We have been waiting for years for the Americans to re-engage in the Iranian issue.’

Obama sought to slash through decades of distrust and animosity by launching a historic appeal directly to the Iranian people, urging a resolution of differences and the launch of an ‘honest’ engagement with the Islamic republic.

In Paris, a foreign ministry spokesman underlined the importance of direct dialogue between Washington and Tehran, and said that Obama’s new approach was in line with the stance of major EU powers.

The EU’s big three—Britain, France and Germany—along with the bloc’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana have been leading efforts to negotiate a halt to Iran’s nuclear program, particularly the enrichment of uranium.

‘We have always said that we support the idea that a direct dialogue should begin,’ foreign ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier said. ‘We think that this is useful and desirable.’

For her part, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said U.S. President Barack Obama's video message to Iran reflected the European view and added that she hoped Tehran would take up his offer.

"I think the message reflects exactly what the Europeans have always wanted -- that an offer is being made to Iran and... (I hope) that this is being used," Merkel said after a meeting by EU leaders in Brussels.

US President Barack Obama's offer of direct talks with Iran is a "very good" one and deserves an "intelligent" response, the man who heads international negotiations over Iran's controversial nuclear program said. Obama's offer of a new diplomatic start with Tehran is a "very constructive message" and a "very good offer," and "I hope very much that Iran will react intelligently," the EU's top diplomat, Javier Solana, told journalists on the fringes of an EU summit in Brussels.

Solana, a former nuclear physicist, is tasked with negotiating with Tehran on behalf of the United Nations Security Council's permanent members and Germany.

That task has long been complicated by the refusal of the US to talk directly with Iran.

So while the world's great powers will "maintain that format" and "will have to tackle the nuclear issue," Solana said that he was "very pleased" by Obama's desire to "reach out to Iran."

"I hope very much Iran will pay good attention to what has been said by President Obama. I hope this will open a new chapter in the relations with Tehran," he said.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini expressed hop that Tehran will send Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to an international conference on Afghanistan at the month-end, which Iran has been invited to attend by the US, “because Iran has great influence over Afghanistan and can help, namely in the fight against drug traffickers.”

A few days earlier, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown heightened pressure on Iran by threatening tough new sanctions unless the Islamic republic accepts an olive branch from Barack Obama and abandons its “concealed nuclear activities”.

In a speech that aides cast as a timely diplomatic intervention, Brown pressed the Islamic republic to reconsider urgently its position and take up an international offer to help it develop a civil nuclear power program.

Brown, who has been largely focused on the financial crisis, delivered his challenge to Iran as he made the case for much wider civil nuclear proliferation, arguing that the world will fail to tackle climate change without building dozens of nuclear power plants.

Brown warned that Iran’s refusal to “play by the rules” would mean “tougher sanctions” and “regional instability”.

Iran rejected the suggestions by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that Tehran should 'make the right choice' in its stand-off with the West over its controversial nuclear program, IRNA reported.

In a speech in London, Brown said with continuing to enrich weapons grade uranium, Iran remained a "critical proliferation threat" and risked severe sanctions.

He, however, said like every country Iran had the right to have civil nuclear power and seek help from the international community for its civil nuclear program, abandoning its drive to have nuclear weapons.

Reacting to Brown's statement, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi said that the British prime minister's comments are full of contradictions.

"Brown's claims are full of contradictions because on the one hand he stresses that like all other countries Iran has absolute right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and on the other he claims that Iran's present nuclear program is unacceptable," Qashqavi said.

He claimed that all nuclear activities of the country were "completely of peaceful nature and under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency".

"The claim that Iran poses a threat to Non-Proliferation Treaty is fully baseless," the spokesman stressed.

He noted that Iran has repeatedly announced readiness for unconditional talks on the basis of fairness and mutual respect but "it is not clear why Brown speaks of Iran's agreement to hold talks while threatening the country with harsher penalties".

Urging Iran to hold talks with the West over its nuclear issue, Brown said Tehran could become a "test case" for co-operation between atomic nations and non-nuclear states.

"I urge Iran, once again, to work with us rather than against us upon this. The opportunity to do so remains on the table and the choice is theirs to make. I think they will make the right choice," said Brown.

In Rabat, Morocco's foreign minister accused Tehran of hiding behind cultural, non-governmental organizations in a concerted bid to implant Shiite ideology in the Sunni-ruled Arab state.

Taieb Fassi Fihri criticized Iranian Shiite "activism" in Morocco, nine days after it severed diplomatic relations with Tehran.

Fihri said that the activism was being stoked "notably by (Iran's) diplomatic representatives in Rabat," and said Iran had failed to provide an explanation for its actions before and after the March 6 decision to cut ties.

While the minister said Shiite adherents in Morocco could be counted in the hundreds, he warned that "Morocco cannot accept activities of this type, whether ordered directly or indirectly, or via so-called NGOs.

"Supposed cultural activities cannot take this form because they are a restriction of fundamental Moroccan (rights)," Fihri added.

While his ministry had previously said Rabat was singled out for diplomatic reprisals by Tehran over the Bahrain controversy, Fihri said other countries were experiencing similar ideological impositions.

The cut in ties was the outcome of a row triggered by an Iranian official who questioned Gulf neighbor Bahrain's sovereignty. Morocco leapt to Sunni Bahrain's defense.

A leading Iranian official said on February 20 that Bahrain -- which hosts the US Navy's Fifth Fleet in the Gulf -- used to be Iran's 14th province and that it had a representative in the Iranian parliament.

Iran moved to try to defuse the spat, which threatened a major bilateral gas deal, by saying it respects Bahrain's sovereignty.