The State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs has just added a Persian language site to the web sites it provides in other world languages – Arabic, Chinese, Russian, French and Spanish. The Persian site will provide information about the United States to Iranians in their own language. Launched on May 12, the State Department’s Persian site has been in development for nearly a year. The following message, from Secretary of State Powell to the Iranian people, was posted on the IIP Persian site:

To the People of Iran:

I welcome you to the new Persian-language website of the United States Department of State. We are pleased to add Persian to the other websites we maintain in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Spanish and French. We hope you will find this site to be a useful source of information about the United States and about U.S. policy toward Iran.

Our differences are not with the Iranian people. Instead, it is the Iranian government’s decisions to support terrorism, to pursue weapons of mass destruction, and to deny human rights to the people of Iran that are the obstacles to improved relations between our two countries.

At the core of U.S. policy is the conviction that people everywhere should enjoy freedom. The United States wants to see a democratic and prosperous Iran, integrated into the global economy. I look forward to the day that Iran takes its rightful place in the family of nations. Our two cultures have so much to offer each other.

Images of Iranians participating in spontaneous candlelight vigils in memory of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. touched us deeply. As President Bush has made clear, “There is a long history of friendship between the American people and the people of Iran. As Iran’s people move toward a future defined by greater freedom, greater tolerance, they will have no better friend than the United States of America.”

I hope you will look upon this website as a gesture of that friendship.

Colin L. Powell