Iranian No-Show at U.N. Mideast Atomic Forum
Iran angrily stayed away Monday from a U.N. atomic agency forum on creating a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, amid growing tensions over Tehran's suspected efforts to develop the bomb.
Iran's ambassador to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Ali Asghar Soltanieh said Tehran's decision was its "first reaction" to the body's "inappropriate" recent report on its nuclear program.
That assessment saw the IAEA come the closest yet to accusing Iran outright of seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Iran, hit by four rounds of U.N. sanctions, says its activities are exclusively for peaceful purposes.
On Friday, the IAEA's board of governors passed a resolution of "deep and increasing concern" submitted by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, Germany and 12 others in light of the report.
U.S. news outlets have reported that Washington was set to unveil new sanctions against Iran on Monday targeting its financial, oil and petrochemical sectors.
Soltanieh said another reason for not attending the two-day forum, aimed at learning from the experiences of other so-called nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZ), was Israel's unofficial atomic arsenal.
"The Zionist regime (Israel)... is pursuing secret nuclear activities which are worrying for the international community," Soltanieh told Iranian television channel al-Alam.
"As long as the Zionist regime does not belong to the NPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty) and does not cooperate with international organizations... this kind of conference is useless and cannot succeed."
Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons but has never confirmed it. Unlike Iran it is not a signatory to the NPT and therefore not subject to IAEA inspections.
Syria, reported by the IAEA to the Security Council over a suspected covert reactor allegedly bombed by Israel in 2007, was however present at the forum, along with Israel, 17 other Mideast states and Palestinian representatives.
NWFZ treaties prohibit the production, acquisition or stationing of nuclear weapons, and also bans nuclear testing.
Zones of this kind already exist in Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central Asia, encompassing 113 countries.
IAEA member states requested in 2000 that such a Mideast forum take place but agreement on holding such a meeting remained elusive until now.
The forum comes ahead of a conference in 2012 to be hosted by Finland on ridding the powder keg region, rocked this year by Arab Spring popular uprisings in several countries, of nuclear weapons.
IAEA head Yukiya Amano, opening the forum, conceded there were "long-standing differences of view" on creating such a zone and the application of agency safeguards to all nuclear activities in the region.
"It has taken 11 years to get to this point," Amano said. "I hope it will nurture fresh thinking -- creative thinking."
Source: Agence France Presse
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