TEHRAN, 26 April 2004 — Iran has closed a German government-funded language institute in Tehran, the German Embassy said yesterday, in what was seen as possible retaliation for a plaque put up in Berlin marking the killing of four Iranian Kurds in an attack officially blamed on the Iranian regime.
“Officially, the reason given to us was that the cultural center did not have the necessary permits,” embassy spokeswoman Deike Potsel told AFP. But privately, other diplomatic sources said they did not rule out the possibility that the closure of the language institute was a tit-for-tat response to the unveiling of the Berlin plaque a week ago.
That plaque, in Berlin’s upmarket Charlottenburg district, marks a 1992 attack in the Mykonos restaurant, and carries the victims’ names and the words: “Murdered by the then regime in Iran. They died fighting for freedom and human rights”.
A German court concluded in 1997 that the killers of the four were acting on Tehran’s orders, prompting the German government to recall its ambassador and the European Union to suspend dialogue with Tehran for a year.
The language institute, shut down on Thursday, was opened in 1996 but its permit expired in 2000. The embassy had been under the impression that there was a tacit agreement from authorities here that it could keep functioning.
In retaliation for the placing of the plaque in Berlin, Tehran’s city council has also decided to erect one of its own denouncing Germany for supplying chemical weapons to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, with whom Iran fought a bitter war from 1980-1988.
And on Wednesday Germany’s ambassador to Iran, Baron Paul von Maltzahn, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to hear of Iran’s “strong objection” to the plaque and hear fresh denials of a state link to the murders.
Iran’s discontent over the Berlin plaque — the result of a decision by local authorities in the German capital and not central government — was also repeated yesterday in the weekly news conference by Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.
