PARIS — Brushing off U.S. pressure to get tough with Iran after its leaders were implicated in political murder by a German court, European Union ministers on Tuesday ordered mild sanctions but did nothing to reduce two-way trade now worth more than $10 billion a year.
"You cannot reproach us for following our economic interests," said German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel.
Meeting in Luxembourg, Kinkel and his counterparts from 14 other European countries also agreed that ambassadors withdrawn from Iran earlier this month could return as soon as Tuesday night, European Commission sources said.
The United States, which deems Iran a terrorist state and broke off diplomatic relations in 1980, has been trying to get European countries to join its campaign to isolate Tehran's Islamic regime politically and economically.
Europe has countered over the past five years with its own approach of "critical dialogue"--profitable trade mixed with regular political meetings to try to improve human rights in Iran and coax its leadership to relinquish alleged support for terrorism--which the Europeans say is far likelier to influence Iranian behavior.
"Not to talk, that is to isolate Iran--and that doesn't appear to be the right thing," French Prime Minister Alain Juppe said Tuesday in Paris.
Europe's approach was thrown into disarray April 10 by the sensational finding of a German court, which ruled that Iranian leaders directly ordered the 1992 assassination of four Kurdish dissidents in a Berlin restaurant.
The verdict sparked the greatest crisis in European-Iranian relations since the 1989 Iranian religious edict calling for the murder of British novelist Salman Rushdie as an alleged blasphemer. In its wake, all the EU countries except Greece recalled their ambassadors from Tehran and suspended the "critical dialogue."
The Clinton administration, which slapped a total embargo on trade with Iran in June 1995, lobbied energetically for the Europeans to take harsh measures in their turn. Over the weekend, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote to European governments, while last week, her former undersecretary for political affairs, Peter Tarnoff, toured European capitals.
However, the ministers, meeting in Luxembourg, could find the necessary unanimity only on a series of relatively mild measures, including a continued freeze on "critical dialogue."
