Iranian President to denounce Security Council at UN Assembly

IRAN: Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to use his speech before the the UN General Assembly on Tuesday to denounce the Security Council, which has imposed sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear defiance.

There is currently a rift within world powers on efforts to stop Iran’s controversial nuclear work, with Russia opposing any new UN Security Council measures against Iran.

“I said to the UN secretary general (Ban Ki-moon) that your Security Council is not the council of the United Nations but that of a few powers,” Ahmadinejad told a news conference on Thursday.

“We are going to talk about our point of view and solutions to the significant issues of today’s world,” he said at Tehran airport before leaving on Sunday.

It will be Ahmadinejad’s fourth visit to the United States for the UN General Assembly since his election in 2005. He is also due to meet students, religious leaders and foreign politicians.

The firebrand president has used previous opportunities to attack Iran’s arch-foes the United States and Israel, and to defend Tehran’s nuclear programme which the West fears could be used for weapons development.

Since December 2006 the UN Security Council has slapped Iran with three sets of sanctions over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment — the process which makes nuclear fuel but can also make the fissile core of an atom bomb.

The Security Council was expected to step up pressure on Iran following last week’s release of a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) deploring Tehran’s failure to heed UN demands to freeze enrichment.

The watchdog has been investigating the Islamic republic’s contested nuclear drive for six years, but has so far been unable to determine whether the programme is entirely peaceful as Iran claims.

The IAEA has also shown its members documents and photographs suggesting that Iran secretly tried to modify its long-range Shahab-3 missile to carry a nuclear bomb, diplomats in Vienna said.

Diplomats from the five permanent Security Council members — the United States, Russia, China, Britain,

France — plus Germany met in Washington on Friday but failed to reach a consensus on how to respond to Iranian defiance.

China and Russia, which have major energy ties with Iran, have resisted further punitive measures, but the United States and France want new sanctions.

Moscow said “it was against the development at this stage of additional measures in the UN Security Council” — a position which may be linked to the current poor state of relations between the United States and Russia.

Tehran, Monday, AFP