Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday his country would be ready to establish “friendly relations” with the United States if it apologized for past wrongs.
“Our slogan is friendly relations with the whole world,” he said.
That would even include “America, if it repents… and apologizes for its previous interferences in Iran, and is prepared to accept the greatness and dignity of the nation of Iran and the great Islamic Revolution,” he said.
“We are still ready to accept America’s… repentance despite the fact that for years it has done injustice to us,” he told foreign diplomats in Tehran during a ceremony to mark the 40th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
During the hostage crisis at Washington’s US embassy in 1979, Iranian students had famously demanded that the US should repent in return for the release of diplomats.
The following year, the two countries cut diplomatic ties, and they have remained estranged ever since.