Date
Author
Елена СУПОНИНА; Петр ИСКЕНДЕРОВ
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
Iran's fate will be decided in London
Tehran and Damascus unite
Today in London representatives of all five countries - permanent members of the UN Security Council, as well as Germany, will gather to discuss the Iranian nuclear program. Due to the severity of the problem, diplomats may have to stay in the British capital until Tuesday. Rumors that the meeting will be held at the level of heads of foreign affairs agencies have not been confirmed. As the Russian Foreign Ministry told Vremya Novostei, our country will be represented either by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak or one of the directors of relevant departments. As for Minister Sergei Lavrov, he is going to London at the end of the month to discuss the problems of Afghanistan and the Middle East with his colleagues.Participants in the London meeting must decide whether to hold an extraordinary meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors on the Iranian issue. This body is authorized to transfer Tehran’s nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council with the prospect of introducing anti-Iranian sanctions. The USA, Great Britain, France and Germany insist on the transfer. China is against it. Russia is taking a wait-and-see approach.
Tehran itself is determined. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will make his first visit this year this week to Syria, which is also threatened by international sanctions. Speaker of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) Gholamali Haddad Adel yesterday threatened that his country would suspend cooperation with the IAEA if the case was referred to the UN Security Council. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the United States and its Western European allies bandits with a “medieval view of the world” and reaffirmed his country’s right to nuclear research for peaceful purposes. Among other things, the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced yesterday that an international scientific conference on the Holocaust will soon be held in Tehran. After all, the Iranian president doubts that the extermination of Jews by the Nazis was such a massive scale.