Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian vowed Monday to work to ensure morality police do not “disturb” women who do not wear the mandatory veil in public, in remarks marking the second anniversary of the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.
“The morality police are not supposed to confront [les femmes]I will make sure that she does not [les] “It doesn’t bother me,” the reformist president said in Tehran, during his first press conference since his election in July.
Mr. Pezeshkian made the remarks two years after the death on September 16, 2022, of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman arrested by morality police for violating Iran’s strict dress code for women.
“Even the Attorney General had said that they had no right to confront” the women, the president added.
During his election campaign, Mr Pezeshkian had promised to remove from the streets the morality police, responsible for monitoring the compulsory wearing of the veil by women.
Mahsa Amini’s death sparked a massive protest movement in Iran that led to the arrest of thousands of people. At least 551 people have been killed, some executed, according to human rights NGOs.
Authorities described the protests as “riots” orchestrated by Western countries.
Mr Pezeshkian, then a member of Iran’s parliament, had sharply criticised the police in September 2022 for the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.
On Monday, Iran’s president also said his government was working to ease draconian restrictions on the internet, particularly on social media.
Since the 2022 protests, Iran has blocked Instagram and WhatsApp, the most widely used apps since blocking YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and TikTok in recent years.
Relations with the West
Mr. Pezeshkian also discussed relations with the United States as well as the Islamic Republic’s military cooperation with Russia, its ally.
“We don’t fight with America if it respects our rights, we don’t fight with anyone; we want to progress in safety,” he said.
“We are not seeking nuclear weapons, we have respected the framework of the agreement” concluded in 2015 between Iran and world powers to regulate the country’s nuclear program, he added.
“We are still seeking to maintain this framework,” Pezeshkian said, adding that the Americans had broken the agreement, thus “forcing” them to take retaliatory measures.
Since the Americans’ resounding withdrawal from this agreement, decided by former Republican President Donald Trump in 2018, the Islamic Republic has gradually freed itself from its commitments.
The president also criticized the West for recently announcing new sanctions against Iran, accusing Tehran of delivering ballistic missiles to Russia to strike Ukraine.
“Disarm Israel”
“It is possible that Iran and Russia cooperated militarily in the past because there was no ban at the time,” he said, adding that he found the Western “boycott” unfair.
Iran had rejected the accusations and threatened to take “measures” in response to the sanctions. British, Dutch, French and German diplomatic representatives had been summoned.
Mr. Pezeshkian also insisted on the country’s right to maintain its missile program to deter Israel, its arch-enemy engaged in a war in the Gaza Strip against the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which Tehran supports.
The West “wants us not to have missiles, that’s good, but first we have to disarm Israel,” he said. Otherwise, the Israelis “can drop bombs on us whenever they want, like in Gaza.”
President Pezeshkian also denied accusations that Iran sent to Yemen the hypersonic missile that the Houthi rebels, allied with Tehran, fired toward Israel on Sunday.
“We don’t have in Iran the type of hypersonic missile that the Houthis are firing,” he said.
Earlier, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied any arms transfer to Yemen.
“The accusation of sending weapons to Yemen is an insult to the Yemeni nation, because Yemen has the necessary technologies and is capable of strengthening its arsenal independently,” the minister was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency on Monday.