Posters for waste separation: city in France angers Iran

A French municipality’s humorous waste separation campaign has led to diplomatic tensions with Iran. Municipal employees in Béziers, southern France, had to remove posters from buses on Thursday that showed Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – under the headline: “Don’t forget to sort the garbage.”

“This is a precautionary measure, we don’t want to take any risks,” said right-wing mayor Robert Ménard. The Iranian Foreign Ministry had previously condemned the advertising campaign and called on the French government to “prevent such provocative actions,” Iranian news agency Irna reported.

“That’s meant to be humorous, I stand by that,” Ménard said in his first reaction. Previous advertising campaigns for waste separation had received little attention, so he decided to create a more “spectacular” advertisement. He doesn’t want to throw people into the trash, but the three people pictured are ultimately “dictators.”

“We took the most conspicuous ones, but there are plenty of others,” said Ménard, who was one of the co-founders of the Reporters Without Borders organization in the 1980s and later became involved with right-wing extremist movements. Finally, the mayor decided to have the posters removed. “We take this seriously,” he said of the Iranian response. He wanted to avoid possible problems.