Fri, Jun 17, 2011 page6

• PRC, Russia press Ahmadinejad

  SECURITY SUMMIT: China’s Hu Jintao and Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev held separate meetings with the Iranian president, urging him to resolve Tehran’s nuclear standoff

  • AFP, ASTANA
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  The leaders of China and Russia on Wednesday pressed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to show more cooperation to resolve Tehran’s nuclear standoff in a rare meeting at a regional security summit.

  Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev held separate meetings with Ahmadinejad, but delivered a similar message of the need to improve dialogue, as the Iranian president again denounced the West as “slavers and colonizers.”

  Host Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev urged the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security group regarded as a NATO rival, to take a more active role in ensuring regional security.

  However, most attention was focused on Ahmadinejad, who was absent from last year’s SCO meeting in Tashkent after the UN Security Council agreed on sanctions against Iran and was making a rare appearance at a big international meeting.

  China urged Iran to participate in the six-party talks on nuclear energy and “take substantial steps in respect of establishing trust” and “speed up the process of dialogue,” Xinhua news agency reported.

  Tehran used to rely on Moscow as a dependable ally in its standoff over the nuclear program, but relations have rapidly deteriorated as Russia increased pressure on Iran after Medvedev became president.

  Medvedev urged Ahmadinejad to take a more constructive approach in the standoff, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, expressing concern that the issue had fallen off the radar amid the uprisings in the Arab world.

  “Although we are also very concerned about what is happening in this region, we feel it is wrong to forget about the deadlock that remains around the Iranian nuclear program,” Russia’s top diplomat said. “The Iranian president was told of the need for more constructive cooperation with the ‘six’ [world powers] and, most importantly, of improving transparency in his contacts with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].”

  Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Saleh, quoted by the IRNA news agency, said the two presidents “insisted on settling the Iranian nuclear question through dialogue.”

  “The Iranian president once again insisted on the fact that Iran is ready to settle our country’s nuclear question through dialogue” with the major powers, Saleh said.

  In a characteristically firebrand speech to the summit peppered with rhetorical questions, Ahmadinejad launched a new call for a wholesale shake-up of the world order, which he said was “managed and run by slavers and colonizers of the past.”

  Turning to his audience of former Soviet and Asian leaders, he asked: “Have any of us used an atomic bomb against the defenseless citizens of any other country?”

  Returning to his past claims that a conspiracy could have been behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, Ahmadinejad added: “Have any of our countries played a part in the creation of 9/11 under whose pretext Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded, and more than 1 million people have been killed or wounded?”

  On the unrest shaking the Arab world, the member states agreed on a declaration expressing concern about the instability, but supporting “the drive of regional states in the path of democratic development in accordance with their specific cultural and historical characteristics.”

  Nazarbayev said in his opening address that the organization had to become a greater force after it showed little capacity to react during last year’s uprising and ethnic violence in member state Kyrgyzstan.

  “Our organization did not and could not make any decisions,” he said.

  With Afghan President Hamid Karzai attending as a guest, Nazarbayev also expressed alarm that drug trafficking in Afghanistan had increased by a factor of 10 in the past decade.

  The SCO’s membership includes former Soviet central Asian states, and with the likes of India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan attending meetings as observers, its summits bring together an eclectic gathering of world leaders.
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