MOSCOW: Moscow on Wednesday, the news agency Tass suggested Khomeini, as an Islamic leader, had no choice but to sentence the Rushdie to death.
The Soviet Union, while expressing concern over the heightening of international tension over the Rushdie affair, had declined to equate Khomeini’s death warrant against the author with terrorism.
The Tass commentary said the world press has distorted and oversimplified the Iranian position on “The Satanic Verses” and put Iran in the position of challenging the West.
But perhaps Imam Khomeini, the supreme religious authority in Tran, had no choice proceeding from Koran teachings other than denouncing a man who has insulted Islam,” Tass said. “The denunciation was nothing more, by the way, than the position of a religious leader.
The Soviet Union has 45 million Moslems, most of them in the five Central Asian republics near the border with Afghanistan and Tran. Soviet officials have expressed concern about growing nationalist fervor in those republics.
Moscow broke its silence on the Rushdie controversy Tuesday when a Foreign Ministry spokesman, commenting on Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze’s visit to Iran, said Moscow may be able to play a “positive role” in resolving the crisis.
The British government said Thursday it rejected an Iranian offer to discuss the controversy over Salman Rushdie, saying Tehran first must repudiate the threat against the author of “The Satanic Verses”. Ahkunzadeh Basti, Iran’s former charge d’affaires in London, suggested in a telephone conversation with the British Foreign Office that the two countries talk abouta resolution approved Tuesday by the Iranian parliament requiring relations to be severed Monday unless London withdraws its support for Rushdie.
When they called back this morning, we said that we would prefer that they renounce the threat of violence first,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.
Police battled hundreds of Moslem demonstrators for the third day Wednesday in Srinagar, provincial capital of India’s only predominately Moslem state, injuring at least 20 people.
Lawyers in Srinagar boycotted the city’s courts to protest the book and to denounce the deaths of at least 15 people during book related violent demonstrations in India since February 13.
More than 1,000 writers, publishers, booksellers and other concerned people from around the world signed a declaration supporting Rushdie’s right to publish free from “intimidation and violence”.
Many Moslems regard “The Satanic Verses” as blasphemous because a dream sequence it contains is viewed as an insulting parody on the life of Mohammed, the founder of Islam.
In Washington, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh pledged to about a dozen publishing industry leaders Wednesday that he would commit “every resource available” to stop terrorism aimed at thwarting the sale of Rushdie’s book.
At the same time, the FBI investigated the firebombing of a weekly New York City newspaper that had editorially defended Rushdie’s novel and at the offices of two California bookstores selling the book.
A federal law enforcement source said the bureau had “good leads” and some witnesses in both New York and California, although there still was no proof the bombings were linked to the Rushdie affair.
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Article extracted from this publication >> March 10, 1989
