Russian, British envoys enrage Iranians with ‘insulting’ photo
The Russian and British ambassadors in Tehran were summoned on Thursday, after a photograph posted on the Russian embassy's Twitter account recalling the 1943 Tehran Conference, angered Iranians inside and outside the country by its colonial implications.
On Wednesday, Russian Ambassador Levan Dzhagaryan and new British Ambassador Simon Shercliff, tried to recreate a World War II conference where the Allied leaders, Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, sat down to discuss how to counter Nazi Germany. The meeting which is historically referred to as the Tehran Conference, is seen as a low point in Iranian independence, as the country was invaded by Allied forces at the time, and no Iranian official was invited or even informed that the meeting was taking place.
The tweet was broadly criticized and received a string of angry comments and calls for it to be removed, while it also drove reactions from many high-ranking officials including Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf who called on both ambassadors to immediately apologize, and outgoing foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who called it “an extremely inappropriate photo.”
At the foreign ministry, both ambassadors explained that they meant no harm. Later in the day, the Russian Embassy said on twitter that the photo op did not carry “any anti-Iranian context” and that it was not intended to “offend the feelings of the friendly Iranian people.” The British Ambassador retweeted the message.
