A hardline Iranian newspaper has claimed Nelson Mandela’s funeral this Sunday could be used as a “trap” to orchestra a meeting between President Hassan Rouhani and US President Barack Obama.
While Tehran has yet to announce who will be representing it at the former South African president’s funeral on December 15, Iranian newspaper Kayhan said in an editorial piece, headlined “Satan lays a trap, this time in Johannesburg”, that the event could be a ploy to bring Rouhani face-to-face with his US counterpart, the AFP news agency reported.
“Some domestic and foreign media outlets are using the funeral ceremony as a pretext to push Rouhani towards a meeting with the head of the Great Satan government,” the Kayhan piece claimed.
The claims come amidst a thawing in diplomatic relations between the two former enemies, especially after a recent deal between Iran and the US, Russia, France, Britain, Germany and China – known as the P5+1 group – offered Tehran some relief from damaging economic sanctions in return for more oversight of its nuclear programme.
In a discussion this week between strategists from Iran and Gulf Arab states at the Manama Dialogue, the Gulf’s top security conference, former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal said it was encouraging that some Iranian leaders had dropped rhetoric denouncing Big Satan (the United States) and Little Satan (Britain), terms used since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The meeting of military officers, diplomats and analysts in Bahrain was the first time public figures from Saudi Arabia and Iran had publicly debated security in the Gulf since the November 24 interim nuclear accord between Tehran and world powers.
While Obama and Rouhani had a 15-minute telephone conversation in September and the Iranian president visited New York for the UN General Assembly, the White House this week was also forced to deny a report by a Kuwaiti newspaper that Obama was planning a visit to Iran in 2014.
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