Iran Pulls Down Anti-U.S. Posters in Capital
The Tehran municipality has removed anti-American posters from the streets of the capital which questioned U.S. honesty in nuclear talks with Iran, media reported on Sunday.
The move comes as President Hassan Rouhani, a reputed moderate, has made fresh overtures to the West, including direct talks between U.S. and Iranian officials, and ahead of the 34th anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure in Tehran.
A municipal spokesman said the posters were put up across Tehran without any official authorization.
"In an arbitrary act and without the knowledge and confirmation of the municipality, one of the advertising agencies had put up these posters," spokesman Hadi Ayyazi was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.
Agence France Presse photographers said that some posters could still be seen across Tehran.
One of them, bearing the words "American honesty," shows U.S. and Iranian negotiators sitting at a table and facing each other, the American wearing a jacket and tie but with army pants and boots underneath.
Ehsan Mohammad-Hassani, head of the Oj adverting agency, which produced the posters, told the Fars news agency they did not reflect hostility towards U.S.-Iranian nuclear talks.
"The American Honesty posters do not have any objection against Iran-America negotiations," he was quoted as saying.
Rouhani, a moderate cleric who has pledged to improve ties with the West, held a historic 15-minute telephone conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama last month, the first direct contact between leaders of the two countries in more than three decades.
The call came as Rouhani was winding up a visit to New York where he attended the U.N. General Assembly.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has backed Rouhani's overtures but criticized some aspects of the U.N. visit as "inappropriate."
Iranians are also split over whether it is still appropriate to chant "Death to America" -- one of the main slogans of the 1979 revolution -- at official ceremonies.
November 4 is the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, during which Islamist students captured and held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.
The crisis triggered the severance of all diplomatic relations between the two countries and contributed to decades of mutual hostility.
Iran and so-called P5+1 -- the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany-- resumed nuclear talks in mid-October and will meet again on November 7 and 8 in Geneva to try and resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.
Israel and the West have long accused Tehran of pursuing a nuclear weapon in the guise of a civilian program, charges adamantly denied by Iran, which insists its nuclear program is entirely peaceful.
Source: Agence France Presse
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