OIC to Regret Its Stances against Iran, Hezbollah: Deputy FM
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs denounced the recent stances taken against Tehran and Hezbollah Resistance Movement in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Summit in Turkey, and described them as being detrimental to Muslim unity.
Speaking in a televised interview on Thursday night, Seyed Abbas Araqchi pointed to Saudi Arabia’s attempts to include statements against Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah Resistance Movement in the draft declaration of the recent OIC Summit, stressing that although Iran and some other Islamic countries were seriously opposed to the move, the OIC approved it without consensus.
“The organization will definitely regret the stances it adopted against Iran and Hezbollah in future,” he added.
“In current situation, the OIC’s general atmosphere is not really an indicative of cooperation among Islamic countries and unity in the Muslim world,” he asserted.
The OIC has always failed to take neutral stances in dealing with the internal issues of the Muslim world and to really help resolve them, he went on to say.
He also dismissed certain reports of meetings between Iran’s president and Saudi king, stressing that there was no contact between Iranian and Saudi delegations, neither at the level of president, nor at that of ministers or diplomats.
“The problems between Saudi Arabia and us is not holding or not holding meetings; the problem is the wrong policies, which should be corrected by the Saudi government so that the grounds would be prepared for (the resumption of) relations between the two countries,” Araqchi noted.
Earlier in his address to the OIC Summit, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for unity in the Muslim world and deplored “any divisive move” at the OIC as unacceptable, saying, “No message which would fuel division in the Islamic Ummah (community) should come out of the OIC conference.”
“Since any divisive move does not enjoy consensus among (the member states) of the organization (the OIC) and the Islamic Ummah and is in conflict with the raison d'être of the organization, it would be invalid,” he stated.
The OIC draft against Iran and Hezbollah was prepared during an expert-level meeting of the organization in February in the Saudi port city of Jaddah. Iranian officials could not attend in the meeting as they were denied visas by Riyadh.
On Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also denounced Saudi Arabia’s move to include statements against Tehran and Hezbollah as “destructive.”
He warned that attempts made by the Saudis to use the OIC mechanism to achieve their political goals resemble efforts by the former regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein against Iran during the organization’s meeting at the time of Iraq’s imposed war against Iran in the 1980s.