An Iranian member of parliament has revealed that French President Emmanuel Macron has sent a message setting three conditions ahead of his upcoming visit to Iran, Al Arabiya reports.
The first demand was that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei should accept the negotiations, secondly, that Iran should accept negotiations over Tehran’s missile programs. The third conditions reportedly focused on Iran’s interferences in the region, its regional war and support for extremist groups.
Javad Karimi Ghodoosi, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committees of Iran’s parliament, said that Macron requested to hold a press conference with his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani, where the latter would announce that Tehran would settle re-negotiating its missile program.
In an interview with The Young Journalists Club, one of the largest Iranian news agency, Ghodoosi stressed that the third demand was that Iran should accept a tripartite meeting with the United States and Saudi Arabia to negotiate ending Iran’s regional role and its support for terrorist groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi militias in Yemen and its interference in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.
These developments come after U.S. President Donald Trump gave the Europeans 120 days last month to negotiate with Iran to review and reform the nuclear deal by adding some appendices on several issues, including the missile program, and guarantee that Iran would not get nuclear weapons, putting an end to the interference of the Revolutionary Guards in the region and ending Iran’s support for terrorism.
European sources have confirmed that Iran has agreed to negotiate with the European Union on its controversial ballistic missile program and its devastating policies while seeking regional expansion in the Middle East, due to the pressure of the U.S. president and his demand to reform the nuclear agreement.
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Great Britain, along with EU foreign policy representative Federica Mogherini, agreed with Tehran to start “intensive and serious talks” on Iran’s missile program and its interference in the affairs of the countries of the region, the Financial Times reported.
For his part, Ahmad Khatami, a hardline member of the Iranian leadership’s expert council and Friday prayer preacher in Tehran, attacked yesterday what he called the “American-European pressure to limit the strength of Iranian missiles.”
“When it comes to the deterrence policy, we explicitly say that we will continue to manufacture what we want of the missiles and will not negotiate with anyone, whether France or others.”
The extremist media also strongly criticized Rouhani’s government and considered France’s economic growth after the recession to be due to the grants and contracts that Rouhani had signed months ago with Paris, while Tehran did not get anything in return.
Nicolas Dufour, the general manager of France’s investment bank, announced that loans were granted to the Iranian investors who buy French goods, which was considered a defiance of U.S. sanctions against Iran, the Iranian News Agency reported.
This happens as the French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian will travel to Tehran on March 5 in preparation for the French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit before the summer. Macron is considered the first European president to announce a planned visit to Tehran since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah.