Khamenei defends Iran's missile programme as UN concerns mount

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has firmly defended the country’s missile programme in the face of rising concerns among members of the UN security council. 

The 76-year-old ayatollah, who is also the country’s commander-in-chief, said in a speech on Wednesday that Tehran would lose its leverage in negotiations with the world’s major powers if it were to abandon its missile programme. “These are times of both missiles and negotiations,” he said. 

“If the Islamic establishment seeks technology and negotiations but does not have defensive power, it will have to back down in the face of any petty country that threatens it,” Khamenei said, according to the state-run Press TV. 

Khamenei, who has the final word on all state matters, was speaking to religious eulogists in Tehran a day after it emerged that the US and its European allies in the security council have written a joint letter warning that recent missile tests by Iran were in defiance of a UN security council resolution adopting last year’s nuclear agreement. 

The letter, which claimed that Iranian missiles were “inherently capable of delivering nuclear weapons”, was carefully drafted and did not say, however, that the tests violated the accord itself, which would have serious implications on its implementation. Russia has disagreed with fundamental outlines of the letter. 

Earlier in March, the elite Revolutionary Guards claimed to have successfully tested two ballistic missiles, Qadr-H and Qadr-F, during large-scale drills. The Fars news agency, which is affiliated to the guards, said the missiles carried a message in Hebrew written on them: “Israel must vanish from the page of time.”

Iran maintains that its missile programme is developed for defensive purposes and has nothing to do with its nuclear programme. The issue was not included as part of the two-year negotiations that led to the nuclear agreement signed last July in Vienna and was therefore expected to remain a bone of contention despite progress on the nuclear front. The US last week imposed new sanctions on two Iranian groups believed to have contributed to the country’s missile programme. 

From the beginning of the nuclear talks, Tehran resisted efforts by the west to include the missile programme as part of the negotiations, saying that the matter was military-related and outside the jurisdiction of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. 

In his Wednesday speech, Khamenei also reprimanded internal critics. “That they say the future of the world is one of negotiation and not one of missiles,” the ayatollah said, “if that is said out of ignorance, well it is ignorance, but if it’s said knowingly, it is treason.” He was invoking, almost word for word, a recent tweet by Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the country’s expediency council, who had said that “the future of the world is one of dialogue, not missiles”.