Dialogue With Deniers: Schrder In Tehran

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder used the occasion of his four day visit in Tehran last week to criticize Iranian Holocaust denial. “The Holocaust is a historical fact, ” Schröder is reported to have said in a speech to the Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce, “and it makes no sense to deny this unparalleled crime.” This was perhaps intended as friendly advice, since Schröder evidently does not believe that the Iranian government’s Holocaust denial or its associated threats against Israel are any reason to curtail relations with Iran. The venue that Schröder chose to make his remarks is revealing in this regard. As it so happens, Schröder is the Honorary Chair of the Near and Middle East Association (NUMOV): a German business association that seeks to facilitate German-Iranian trade and that opposes sanctions against Iran.  (For some related comments by NUMOV managing director Helene Rang, see here.) 

Schröder’s trip was ostensibly undertaken as a “private visit,” but it is known to have been coordinated with the German Foreign Ministry. While in Tehran, Schröder met with many of the public figures most closely connected to Iranian Holocaust denial: starting, of course, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has declared outright that the Holocaust is a “myth.”  The meeting was preceded by a warm handshake. (See here.) Schröder also met with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Ali Larijani. In December 2005, in remarks reported by the Italian news service AKI, Mottaki described Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial as the official “view of the [Iranian] government.” If Europe is interested in having a dialogue with Iran, Mottaki was quoted as saying, “it has to learn to listen to our opinions and take them into account.” One year later, Mottaki gave the opening address at an international conference in Tehran that brought together some of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers on the invitation of the Iranian government.

As for Larijani, just three weeks ago – and at the Munich Security Conference of all places! – he again defended Iranian denial of the Holocaust, saying that there could be “different points of view” on the matter (source: Focus). A photographer of the German wire service dpa captured Larijani and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier sharing a moment of apparently great mirth at a conference reception. Steinmeier is the Social Democratic candidate for chancellor in the upcoming German elections. He was previously one of Gerhard Schröder’s closest advisors as the head of the Office of the Chancellery from 1999 to 2005. 

In June 2008, Larijani’s brother Mohammad, himself a former deputy foreign minister of Iran, sparked controversy in Germany by calling for the “end of the Zionist project” – a euphemism for the elimination of Israel – at a “Transatlantic Conference” in Berlin. The theme of the publicly-funded conference was the search for “common solutions” in the Middle East. Conference organizer Bernd Kubbig would subsequently defend his invitation of Larijani by noting that it was none other than the Foreign Ministry of Frank-Walter Steinmeier that had recommended Larijani to him (source: Financial Times Germany).

Schröder’s trip to Iran represents that nec plus ultra of Germany’s much-vaunted “dialogue model,” which is supposed to compare so favorably to the well-known intransigence of the erstwhile American administration. It is, as if, Ahmadinejad and Larijani, on the one hand, and Schröder and Steinmeier, on the other, were having a “dialogue” on whether or not the Holocaust occurred. Moreover, the outcome of this “dialogue” – or whether there even is an outcome – appears to be irrelevant to the continued pursuit of German-Iranian cooperation. “The relations between Tehran and Berlin are too important to be overshadowed by a subject such as the Holocaust,” Iranian Ambassador to Berlin, Aliresa Sheikh-Attar, was reported as saying by the German state news agency Deutsche Welle. Apparently, Tehran’s German interlocutors agree.

Several English-language news reports (including reports in the International Herald Tribune and in the em>Jerusalem Post<) suggested that Schröder was in Iran to engage in lobbying on behalf of the Russian energy giant Gazprom. Schröder is the chairman of the supervisory board of Nordstream, a Russian-German joint venture to transport Russian natural gas to Germany. According to Iranian sources, however, Schröder was supposed to “meet Iranian Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari to discuss Iranian gas exports to the European Union.” The Iranian gas would presumably be transported via the rival Nabucco pipeline: an EU-sponsored pipeline project that is designed to reduce European dependence on Russian natural gas and that is widely acknowledged by experts to make no economic sense without Iranian participation. (On Nabucco, see my March 2008 report “Nabucco Follies”.)