Shevardnadze to Meet Khomeini : Diplomat on Final Leg of 10-Day Middle East Tour

NICOSIA, Cyprus —  Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze arrived in Tehran on Saturday for a rare audience with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that promises a thaw in long-strained relations between the neighbors.

The official Islamic Republic News Agency said Shevardnadze, the highest-ranking Soviet official to visit Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, carried a message for Khomeini from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. IRNA, monitored in Nicosia, gave no hint about the letter’s contents.

Shevardnadze is on the final leg of a 10-day mission aimed at boosting Moscow’s influence in the Middle East.

The Soviet foreign minister has refused to say whether he will discuss with Khomeini the Iranian leader’s death sentence on British novelist Salman Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his book “The Satanic Verses.”

Diplomats Recalled

West European countries have recalled their senior diplomats from Tehran to protest the threat. Sources in London said Friday that Britain had asked Shevardnadze to press Iran to renounce its death threat.

Moscow was the main arms supplier to Iraq, Iran’s enemy in the eight-year Persian Gulf War, and it withdrew thousands of technicians from Tehran when the fighting began.

IRNA did not say when Shevardnadze will meet Iran’s revolutionary 88-year-old patriarch, who seldom meets with foreign dignitaries.

Khomeini sent Gorbachev an unprecedented personal message last month, praising his reforms and urging him to pay more attention to the Soviets’ spiritual needs.

Officials in both countries called the message a “turning point” in relations which also have been improved by the Soviet military withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan and greater religious freedoms granted the 50 million Muslims in the Soviet Union.

Tehran’s English-language daily, Kayhan International, said Shevardnadze’s three-day visit to Tehran heralds closer ties.

“There is wide scope for Iran and the Soviet Union to cooperate on the regional and international scene,” it said.

IRNA reported Shevardnadze was greeted at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport by Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and other senior officials.

An indication of the thaw in Soviet-Iranian relations came last month, when Tehran announced it would start exporting 3 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Moscow in exchange for Soviet heavy industrial machinery and spare parts for its oil installations damaged during the war with Iraq.

Western diplomats based in the gulf region earlier this week described Khomeini’s decision to meet with Shevardnadze as a “snub” to the West.

The top Soviet diplomat flew to Iran from Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.

The official Iraqi News Agency said President Saddam Hussein told Shevardnadze that he rejects attempts to freeze stalemated Iran-Iraq peace talks.

“Iraq rejects attempts to freeze the situation within the framework of no war, no peace,” the agency said, adding, “Iraq wants a comprehensive and durable peace.”

Shevardnadze’s visit was the first ever to Iraq by a Soviet foreign minister.

Before leaving, he called for the withdrawal of foreign navies from the Persian Gulf.