Your Most Trusted Source of Foreign
News and Views About the United States
|
|
Your Most Trusted Source of Foreign
News and Views About the United States
|
By Correspondent Corine Lesnes
September 19, 2005
Original Article (French) 
New York, United Nations: If there had been any doubt of
In his first outing to a Western country, Mr. Ahmadinejad, a former "Revolutionary Guard" who became mayor of Teheran, combined references to Islamic tradition with the most radical third-world attacks against the "powerful ones." Standing before the world's representatives, he did not appear the least bit intimidated, and some of those he met even considered him "reserved" and "down to earth. In front of the press, he displayed a complete understanding of the nuclear issue, while fielding a constant stream of notes from his chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, who has been portrayed as one of the regime's biggest ideologues.
Iran's first lay-president [non-cleric] in a quarter century, while in New York Mr. Ahmadinejad met a dozen heads of State: from Russian Vadimir Putin to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Georgian Mikhail Saakashvili to Chinese Hu Jintao. He also held a breakfast with representatives of the American press at the Intercontinental Hotel, and granted interviews to Time, Newsweek and CNN. The journalists were astonished with his remark: "How did Hurricane Katrina receive its name? he asked.
During his press conference at the U.N., he paid homage to the inhabitants of New York, immobilized by the congestion caused by the presence of 150 heads of State. "I saw enormous numbers of people stopped at red lights," he said with amazement. But the limits of the President's civility reared up when he refused to answer the question of an Israeli reporter, who wanted to know if he sought the destruction of the State of Israel, which is still Iran's official policy. He curtly went on to the next question.
Later, he offered his opinion on the "Road
Map," which is supposed to find a path to peace between
For some days, the Europeans and Americans have been waiting for new proposals on the nuclear issue, hoping at avoid bringing the issue before the U.N. Security Council. In his speech before the General Assembly, the president first denounced "nuclear apartheid," i.e., the fact that only certain countries have the right to have nuclear fuel and sell it to others. "The irony of the situation is that those who have, in fact, used nuclear weapons, and who continue to produce them, to test and to accumulate them - those who have used bombs containing depleted uranium against hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Kuwaitis, and even against their own soldiers by putting them at risk of incurable diseases ... that those who have not signed the treaty for the complete prohibition of nuclear tests [Nuclear Test Ban Treaty] and who have armed the Zionist regime with weapons of mass destruction ... are the ones who endeavor to prevent other countries from acquiring the technology necessary for the production of civilian nuclear power," he declared in an attack against the United States.
The Iranian president proposed the creation of a General Assembly committee which would look into the means for achieving complete disarmament. He offered to engage his country, "in a serious partnership with the public or private sector of other countries for implementation of a program of enrichment - of Iranian uranium." Companies such as Urenco, for example, a British-Dutch-German consortium, would be invited to join. "Why do some want to keep fuel and sell it to us at ten times its value? We commit ourselves to reselling ours at a price 30% less expensive than the price they propose, has told CNN.
The president cited the mediation of the
three European countries (
The Iranian proposals failed to arouse even the least enthusiasm among European and American officials in charge, who acted in concert to formulate a response to introduce at the today's [Monday's] meeting of the IAEA Council of Governors in Vienna. "This comes down to saying: first you create a committee to disarm the United States and Israel, said a European diplomat. "Next, you give us the capital for us to enrich uranium. This is quite stunning."
