Iran's Expediency Council Chairman and former president Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Wednesday that his country would remove
the current obstacles to talks with the United States if it shows
good will to Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Rafsanjani made the remarks in a meeting with a number of
students from Mashhad's Ferdowsi and medical sciences
universities.
Answering a question on Iran's relations with the US, the senior
official said that "we will in return remove obstacles in the way
of dialogues once the US somehow sends a signal showing good will
in its dealings with Iran".
The hegemonic and colonial approach of US officials is the most
important impediment to its relations with other countries, he
added.
Terming Iran's political independence as an exemplar, Rafsanjani
said nowadays no country could interfere the Islamic Republic's
major decision-making process.
These affairs are dealt on the will of Iranian people, he
stressed.
Tensions of Iran's relations with the US recently has escalated
due to Tehran's hardline stance toward the nuclear issue and what
Washington said of Iran's "bad role" in Iraq's internal
affairs.
The United States has accused Iran of supporting the Iraqi
insurgents to fight with coalition forces since the fall of Saddam
Hussein's regime in 2003, but Tehran has denied it and saying such
allegations were deliberate intervention to the Iran-Iraq ties by
the US.
(Xinhua News Agency February 15, 2007)
