Ali Akbar Velayati

Ali Akbar Velayati, or Welajati (Persian علیاکبر ولایتی; born June 25, 1945 in Shimran ) is an Iranian politician and served from 1981 to 1997 Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iran. Currently Velayati 's foreign policy adviser to the Supreme Leader, Sayyid Ali Chamene'i and was selected by the Guardian as a candidate for a parliamentary seat for the Iranian parliamentary elections in 2012.

Life

Velayati studied medicine at the University of Tehran, specializing in pediatrics, including also at Johns Hopkins University. Until shortly before the Islamic revolution Velayati worked as a pediatrician in San Francisco. With the Iranian presidential election in 1981 and the election victory Chamene'is Velayati was appointed by the latter to the foreign minister and remained under the presidency of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani Alī until the election of Mohammad Khatami's Iran's foreign minister.

On November 10, 1995, a majority of the German Bundestag to withdraw the then- Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati - sent invitation to attend an Islamic conference in Bonn. Reason for the outreach were expressions of the then incumbent President Hashemi Rafsanjani on the occasion of the terrorist attack on the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In recent times, Velayati made ​​with critique of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attention: "The government is responsible for the nuclear issue " and ". Their representatives should avoid illogical and provocative sayings " to the question whether the Holocaust was a historical Realtität, Velayati said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on 14 February 2007: "Yes, but we do not accept that this reality is used as a justification for the oppression of the Palestinians. "