(Adnkronos) – Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani has ordered Iran’s ambassador to the foreign ministry over the “unacceptable” crackdown on anti-government protests which has killed some 2,000 people since late December, an Iranian official said on Tuesday
“I summoned the Iranian ambassador to the foreign ministry at 5.30 pm,” Tajani told members of Italy’s lower house of parliament.
“The value of freedom is the basis for our government’s actions. That freedom for which Iranian men and women have been fighting in the streets and squares for days, paying a very high price in blood, suffering, imprisonment and probably torture,” said Tajani.
“All this is absolutely unacceptable”, he underlined.
Italy has “always maintained a discreet presence in Iran” and has been “careful not to break off dialogue, which is always important, even with regimes that are far-removed from us,” Tajani said.
“But dialogue does not mean passive acceptance of a regime that violently represses its own citizens,” Tajani said.
Rights groups claim over 1,000 people have likely been killed and over 10,700 have been arrested in the nationwide demonstrations.
The protests began on 28 December over the dire state of Iran’s economy and have widened into opposition to clerical rule, involving diverse sectors of society.
Iranian authorities shut down the Internet on 8 January, hampering the flow of information on events in the country, and accuse the US and Israel of fomenting the unrest.
