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The
U.N. Security Council voted
unanimously today to impose
sanctions against Iran over its
uranium-enrichment activities.
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STATEMENT
BY IRAN'S AMB. MOTTAKI TO U.N.
SECURITY COUNCIL ON SANCTIONS
AGAINST IRAN (FULL TEXT) (MaximsNews.com, U.N.)
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The
text reads as follows:
MANOUCHEHR
MOTTAKI, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Iran,
said it was the fourth time in the last 12
months that the Security Council, orchestrated
by a few of its permanent members, was “being
abused to take an unlawful, unnecessary and
unjustifiable action against the peaceful
nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic of
Iran, which presents no threat to international
peace and security and falls, therefore, outside
the Council’s Charter-based mandate”.
“Iran’s nuclear programme is completely
peaceful,” he stressed. His country had
expressed its readiness, taken unprecedented
steps and offered several serious proposals to
address and allay any possible concern in that
regard. Indeed, there had been no doubt
from the beginning, nor should there be any for
the Council, that all those “schemes of the
co-sponsors of the resolution are for narrow
national considerations, and aimed at depriving
the Iranian people of their inalienable rights,
rather than emanating from any so-called
proliferation concerns”. In order to give that
scheme a semblance of international legitimacy,
its initiators had first manipulated the IAEA
Board of Governors and, as they themselves had
acknowledged, coerced some of its members, to
vote against Iran in the Board. Then, they
had taken advantage of their substantial
economic and political power to pressure and
manipulate the Security Council to adopt three
unwarranted resolutions within eight months.
Undoubtedly,
he said, those resolutions could not indicate
universal acceptance, particularly when the
Heads of State of nearly two thirds of United
Nations Members, who belonged to the Non-Aligned
Movement and the Organization of the Islamic
Conference, had supported Iran’s positions as
recently as September 2006, and had expressed
concerns about policies pursued inside the
Security Council. Those resolutions did
not even reflect the views of the Council’s
own 15 members, since most of them had not been
thoroughly informed about, let along engaged in,
the discussions “held in secret meetings”,
where only a few, among them non-members,
decided for the whole Council.
“This
is not the first time the Security Council is
asking Iran to abandon its rights,” he said.
When Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran 27 years
ago, the Council had waited seven days so that
Iraq could occupy 30,000 square kilometres of
Iranian territory. Then, it had
unanimously adopted resolution 479 (1980).
That text had asked the two sides to stop the
hostilities, without asking the aggressor to
withdraw. The Council, then too, had
effectively asked Iran to suspend implementation
of parts of its right -- at that time, its right
to 30,000 square kilometres of its territory.
As expected, the aggressor had dutifully
complied; but, imagine what would have happened
if Iran had complied: “We would then be
begging the Council’s then sweetheart,
President Saddam Hussein, to return our
territory”. Iran had not accepted
the demand to suspend its right to its
territory. It had resisted eight years of
carnage and use of chemical weapons, coupled
with pressure from the Council and sanctions
from its permanent members.
Consideration
by the Council of the Iranian peaceful nuclear
programme had no legal basis, and the referral
of the case to the Council and adoption of
resolutions failed to meet the minimum standards
of legality, he said. “ Iran’s
peaceful nuclear activities cannot be
characterized as a threat to peace by any
stretch of law, fact or logic,” he said.
Rather, certain members of the Council had
decided to “hijack the case from the IAEA
…and politicise it”. In order to
achieve the politically motivated and unlawful
goal of depriving Iran from its inalienable
right to nuclear energy, attempts had been made
to manufacture evidence. Iran had had to
implement transparency measures outside all IAEA
safeguards and protocols and allow the Agency
inspectors more than 20 visits to sensitive
military sites, which had no connection
whatsoever to its nuclear programme. In
fact, over the last four years, IAEA had
conducted more than 2,100 person days of
scrutiny of all Iranian nuclear facilities.
All IAEA reports since November 2003 had
indicated the peaceful nature of the Iranian
nuclear programme, and it had confirmed, in
2003, and maintained since then, that “to
date, there is no evidence that the previously
undeclared nuclear material and activities
…were related to a nuclear weapons program”.
Continuing,
he said that, on several occasions, the Agency
had concluded that all the declared nuclear
material in Iran had been accounted for and,
therefore, such material had not been diverted
to prohibited activities. As recently as
February 2007, its Director General had stated
in his report that the Agency had been able to
verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear
material in Iran. He had also indicated to
the Board of Governors on 5 March 2007 that the
Agency had seen no “industrial capacity to
produce weapon-usable nuclear material, which is
an important consideration in assessing the
risk”.
It
was very unfortunate that the Council, under the
manifest pressure of a few permanent members,
persisted in trying to deprive a nation of its
inalienable right to develop nuclear technology
for peaceful purposes, while that nation had
met, and continued to honour, its international
obligations, he said. The Council’s
decision to try to coerce Iran into suspension
of its peaceful nuclear programme was a gross
violation of Article 25 of the Charter, and
contradicted the Iranian people’s right to
development and education.
He
said that today’s resolution was punishing a
country that had been a committed member of the
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, with all its nuclear facilities under
the monitoring of IAEA’s inspectors and their
cameras. The resolution imposed sanctions
on a country that had fulfilled all of its
commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty
and IAEA, and which demanded nothing more than
its inalienable rights under that Treaty.
Was there any better way to undermine an
important multilateral instrument that dealt
directly with international peace and security?
Was not that action by the Council, in and
of itself, a grave threat to international peace
and security? he asked.
The
resolution had clearly departed from the stated
aims of its sponsors, he went on. By
targeting Iran’s defence, economic and
educational institutions, it was pursuing
objectives far beyond Iran’s peaceful nuclear
programme. The sanctions were clearly
targeting an independent, proud and tireless
nation with thousands of years of culture and
civilization. Plus, it had been adopted at
a time when, not only had all initiatives to
return to a negotiated solution been neglected,
but also certain countries had not even allowed
the presentation of such proposals. Iran
had always been ready for unconditional
negotiations, aimed at finding a mutually
acceptable solution. Iran had done its
best to achieve that objective and had presented
numerous proposals to provide necessary
assurances about the peaceful nature of its
nuclear programme. The only interpretation
that could be drawn from the “rush to adopt”
today’s resolution and prevent negotiations,
was that of ulterior motives of the sponsors and
the lack of political will to find solutions.
Finally,
he asserted, the current resolution had been
adopted against Iran’s peaceful nuclear
programme at a time when major nuclear Powers
continued to flout the persistent demand of the
international community for nuclear disarmament.
Instead, they jeopardized international peace
and security by developing new generations of
those weapons and by threatening to use them.
He
asked whether adoption of the present resolution
strengthened international peace and security;
whether it augmented the credibility of
important international mechanisms, such as the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA and even the
Security Council; and whether it enhanced the
confidence of countries and developing nations
that they could attain their rights through
those mechanisms and instruments. He
asked, too, whether the text increased trust in
multilateral mechanisms and whether it decreased
unilateralist tendencies. The only outcome
of the resolution was that freedom-loving people
and Governments in the world would gain
confidence that they could not rely on
multilateral institutions to attain their
legitimate rights.
Because
of the Council’s “unlawful and unjust”
approach, its texts had, until now, failed to
lead to a resolution of the issue, he said.
Those resolutions, and the certainty of some
permanent members that they could get them
“one way or the other”, were, and had always
been, part of the problem and an impediment to
finding a real and mutually acceptable solution.
That was why Iran continued to insist on the
imperative of stopping that practice, which
would only exacerbate the situation and erode
the authority and credibility of the Council.
There were only two alternatives in dealing with
the Iranian peaceful nuclear programme:
cooperation and interaction, or confrontation
and conflict.
He
said his country did not seek confrontation, and
pressure and intimidation would not change
Iranian policy. If certain countries had
pinned their hopes that repeated resolutions
would “dent the resolve of the great Iranian
nation”, they should have no doubt that they
had “once again faced catastrophic
intelligence and analytical failure vis-à-vis
the Iranian people’s Islamic revolution”.
Probably at no time in the history of Iran had
the entire people been so solidly behind a
national demand. Even the harshest
political and economic sanctions or other
threats were “far too weak to coerce the
Iranian nation to retreat from their legal and
legitimate demands”.
He
invited the concerned parties to “come back to
the path of negotiation based on justice and
truth”. Suspension was neither an option
nor a solution. The United States and the
“European Union three” had unwarrantedly
insisted on suspension, while they knew that was
an unfair and unacceptable precondition for
negotiations. Suspension had been in place
for two years, and IAEA had repeatedly verified
that Iran had fully suspended what it had agreed
to suspend in each and every report from
November 2003 to February 2006. So, it had
had an experience of suspension, but there had
been neither results nor solutions. If the
time they had spent insisting on suspension and
the efforts they had exerted to impose sanctions
had been invested in genuine negotiation, it
would have yielded much better results.
~~~~~
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