DIPLOMACY : Tehran’s Man at U.N. Defends Iran in America

Some American specialists detect signs that Iran is eager to improve its tense, bruised relationship with the United States. But Kamal Kharrazi, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, offers little hope that this is so.

The United States, he insisted in a recent interview with The Times, is “involved in a kind of psychological war against my country. So in such an atmosphere there is no room to talk about relations.”

Kharrazi, 49, a soft-spoken, articulate man who earned a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Houston, is the highest-ranking Iranian diplomat in the United States. There is no Iranian Embassy in Washington. The United States broke relations with Iran in 1979, after militant students took American officials hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

With an ironic smile, Kharrazi said he has not had any contact with any high American official since arriving at the United Nations in 1989, and added that he has never tried to have any.

All the same, Kharrazi seems intent on elaborating an Iranian view of the world for the American public. The Iranian view of the world, however, is still difficult at times for an American to accept. Kharrazi, for example, defended the Iranian fatwa , or sentence of death, on the novelist Salman Rushdie and insisted there is nothing wrong with the Iranian government’s treatment of the 300,000 Iranians of the Bahai faith.

Kharrazi was clearly unconcerned that the U.N. Commission on Human Rights had uncovered an Iranian government document that called for blocking the “progress and development” of the Bahais. While Bahais should not be arrested, imprisoned, penalized or expelled without reason, the document stated, schools, universities and jobs would be barred to them if they identified themselves as Bahais. The document was prepared by the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council.

“Bahais are not recognized in Iran . . . as an official religious body,” Kharrazi said. He explained that Bahais believe that their original 19th-Century leader was the last prophet of Islam. “According to our belief,” he went on, “we think that our prophet (Mohammed) was the last prophet of the prophets. . . . We cannot recognize them as a religion because it is against the belief of Muslims.”

Yet the ambassador clearly wanted to demonstrate that Iran now adheres to international laws and customs. He denied that official or unofficial Iranian agencies are assisting the Islamic fundamentalist movements in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia; he described as “nonsense” the accusations that Iran had funded the bombers of the World Trade Center.

For similar reasons, Kharrazi dismissed the idea that Iranian foundations are funding these movements.

“Egyptian Muslims or Algerian Muslims, they do not follow the religious leaders in other countries,” he said. “They follow their own religious leaders, based on their own school of thought.”

Kharrazi also denied that Iran has shipped arms or other prohibited goods to Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Muslims have been subjected to brutal “ethnic cleansing.”

“No,” he said. “We have observed the Security Council resolutions.”