Iran assured this Monday that it is ready for a complete prisoner exchange with the United States, and warned that if the Democratic candidate Joe Biden wins the November elections and wants to return to the 2015 nuclear agreement, he will have to "compensate" Tehran first for the damage caused by the withdrawal.
"There are Iranians who are in US prisons simply because they do not want to betray their country. We are prepared to exchange all of them (for Americans imprisoned in Iran)," the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told the US centre Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Zarif, who spoke by videoconference at a virtual event organised by the centre on the occasion of the UN General Assembly, thus answered a question about why he was not releasing Siamak Namazi, who has dual US and Iranian nationality and has been imprisoned in Iran for years with his father Baquer.
The United States and Iran have exchanged some prisoners in recent years, but their relationship has deteriorated deeply under the mandate of US President Donald Trump, who withdrew the US from the 2015 nuclear agreement and re-imposed on Iran all the sanctions it had lifted as a result of the pact.
Zarif said on Monday that he does not care "at all" if Trump or Biden win the November elections, and called the accusation that Iran has launched cyber-attacks to influence the elections "absurd", as Microsoft denounced this month. "We don't care who goes to the White House", but "the behaviour of the US government", he claimed.
Biden has stated that if he wins in November and comes to power in January, he would bring the United States back into the nuclear agreement, provided that Iran "returns to strict compliance with the pact".
However, the Iranian minister rejected this condition, particularly the idea that Biden would seek to launch new negotiations later in order to "strengthen" the pact and "address other issues" unrelated to Iran's nuclear dossier. "They cannot go back now and say they want to achieve more because they did not succeed at first. That is not good faith," Zarif said.
The head of Iran's diplomacy set his own condition: in order to rejoin the agreement, Washington would have to "correct the damage" it did to the multilateral pact by withdrawing.
"The United States has to show the rest of the participants that it will not make demands outside the agreement, and that it will compensate Iran for all the damages-billions of dollars in damages-that it has caused Iran (by withdrawing), simply because (Trump) did not like the previous US president (Obama)", he stressed.
It is practically impossible for the United States to agree to compensate Iran financially for the losses resulting from the re-imposition of sanctions.
Zarif spoke at the same time as the US announced new sanctions against Iran, and the signing of a Trump decree that will allow it to punish anyone who violates the arms embargo against Tehran, which expires next October but which Washington wants to maintain at all costs.
The Iranian minister doubted that these sanctions "will have a significant impact" on his country, as "the United States has already exerted all the pressure it can", but made it clear that he is still considering taking reprisals for the US assassination of the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. "I do not like to threaten, but we have not closed" that possibility, Zarif said.
