Western help to Iran's nuclear programme

The documents available in the official archives of the British and the American governments reveal a history of the US and its allies laying the foundation of Iran's nuclear programme in the 1960s and 1970s with Russian and German support sustaining it through the 1990s to the new millennium.

The declassified secret US National Security Council Memorandum dated April 22, 1975 noted the presidential decision sanctioning the Iran-US framework for nuclear cooperation: "The US shall permit US material to be fabricated into fuel in Iran for use in its own reactors and for (passing) through to third countries with whom we have agreements."

The declassified secret US documents show the American decision followed the earlier nuclear cooperation dating back to 1967 when the US supplied the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre (TNRC) a five-megawatt pool-type nuclear research reactor, hot cells, and highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel capable of producing nuclear fuel and reprocessing some 600 grams of plutonium annually. The US cooperation with the TNRC continued till the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

During recent inspection, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) discovered traces of highly enriched uranium (HEU) on some of the centrifuges with allegations flying off in the western press that they proliferated from Pakistan.

Iran has denied that the technology came from Pakistan while Islamabad has put its nuclear scientists under detention for what it calls "debriefing." Declassified confidential records show that during October 1977, a representative of the US state department, Sydney Sober, declared that Iran was purchasing eight nuclear reactors from the US for generating electricity.

On July 10, 1978, the final draft of the US-Iran nuclear energy agreement was signed. The same year, the US based Jeffrey Eerkins was reported to have supplied laser enrichment facilities for Iran's Ibn-i-Heysam Research Laboratory Complex.

Declassified confidential records show that during 1970s the US government encouraged the Iranian government to follow the proposal of the Stanford Research Institute to invest in several nuclear reactors to meet its energy requirements and award the contracts to American companies for the purpose. In 1975, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology signed a contract with the AEOI for providing training for the first cadre of Iranian nuclear engineers.

The secret Memorandum of NSC, April 1975, gives an insight into the nuclear cooperation when it notes that the US shall "agree to set the fuel ceiling at a level reflecting the approximate number of nuclear reactors planned for purchase from the US suppliers. We would, as a fallback, be prepared to increase the ceiling to cover Iran's full nuclear requirement under the proviso that the fuel represents Iran's entitlement from their proposed investment in an enrichment facility in the US."

However, instead of hiring the US firms for building the twenty-three nuclear reactors envisioned by the Shah of Iran, Kraftwek Union, a subsidiary of Siemens of West Germany, was awarded the contract in 1974 for constructing two 1300 megawatt nuclear power reactors at Bushehr. The German cooperation with Iran continued well into mid-1990s. The German firms Leybold, Thyssen, Sket Magdeburg, Karl Schenck of Darmstadt and Magnetfabrik Bonn negotiated deals to supply materials to be used in nuclear technology to Iran.

The supplied materials, according to documented research, included vacuum arc furnace, vacuum pumps, gas centrifuge, calutron component, ferretic ring magnets, balancing machine and a machine tool manufacturer. The supplied material had the use in power reactors, fuel fabrication and weaponization and gas centrifuge manufacturing and calutron production.

In 1974, the French company, Framatome, signed an agreement with Iran to build two 950 megawatt pressurized nuclear reactors. Furthermore, Iran loaned the French Eurodif $1 billion for the uranium enrichment plant at Tricastin. Iran was expected to buy 10 per cent of Eurodif's three per cent enriched uranium fuel.

However, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the deals fell through with the International Commerce Commission (ICC) ruling that France must repay Iran the $1 billion and that Tehran would retain a small share in Eurodif. In the mid-1970s, France also provided assistance for the establishment of the Nuclear Technology Centre at Isfahan for training the personnel working with the Bushehr reactors.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Iraq-Iran War led to drastic changes in US defence policy towards Iran. After the Iranian Revolution, the US started reconsidering its nuclear policy towards Iran. In August 1991, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Orange Country Register reported supply of US software and parts shipped by a firm ended up with the Iranian military.

As a consequence, Reza (Ray) Amiri and Mohammed (Don) Danesh were indicted for supplying Sharif University, Iran, with ending oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and pulse generators that could be used in weaponization and gas centrifuge production.

Reportedly, at the time the Shah's government was toppled, the Bushehr-1 was 90 per cent complete and 60 per cent of its equipment had been installed, while Bushehr-2 was 50 per cent complete. Officials of Technischer Ueberwachungsverein, Germany's National Reactor Inspectorate, thought that had Iraq not bombed the Bushehr-1 during the Iran-Iraq war, the reactor would have been completed in about three years.

It was thought the German Kraftwerk Union, along with its US partner in global power projects, the US corporation Bechtel Power, would have completed the work except for the changed geo-political scenario. According to the US based Centre for Non-Proliferation Studies, Italy's Ansaldo, a division of Finmeccanica, was contracted by the German Kraftwerk Union to supply the Bushehr reactors with eight steam condensers. However, the shipment was blocked indefinitely during the Iran-Iraq war and in 1993, Italian customs in Porto Marghera seized the steam condensers as they were bound for Iran.

Failure of the West to complete the negotiated Bushehr forced Iran to look towards Russia to complete its first nuclear power plant. Russian minister of atomic energy Viktor Mikhailov and the head of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran, Reza Amrollahi, signed a $800 million contract in January 1995, calling for Russia to complete the first unit of the unfinished nuclear power station at Bushehr by installing a 1,000MW VVER-1000 light-water reactor at the site within four and a half years.

On July 28, 1998, President Clinton announced that the United States had imposed economic sanctions against seven firms under investigation by the Russian government for proliferating WMDs to Iran, North Korea and Libya. The Russian government commission on export control, chaired by minister of the economy Yakov Urinson, decided to conduct further "special investigations" against the companies. The Russian companies sanctioned by the US government in 1998 included Glavkosmos, the INOR Scientific Production Center, the Grafit State Scientific Research Institute, the Polyus Scientific Research Institute, the "MOSO" company, Evropalas 2000, and the Baltic State Technical University.

Researchers opine that allegations against Pakistan for supplying the URENCO centrifuge design information to Iran pale into insignificance when compared with the official documents detailing the supply of nuclear technology to the oil-rich Gulf state by the US, Germany, France, and other European countries. According to Simon Henderson, London based associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, what is happening now is "using the Iran-centrifuge scandal, Washington can pressure Gen. Pervez Musharraf to shut down perhaps half of his nuclear-weapons projects."

Intimidating the press

The murder of Manik Saha, the Khulna-based reporter of the daily New Age, on Jan 15 by yet-to-be identified assailants has moved and shocked Bangladeshi journalists. In Khulna, journalists called a dawn-to-dusk shutdown in the divisional headquarters on January 17, protesting against the killing and demanding the immediate arrest of the assailants.

While people in general are against the political culture of enforcing shutdowns, Khulna witnessed a successful general strike, and that too with hundreds of people taking to the streets against Saha's murder.

The popular emotion aroused by the murder is easily understood: people's democratic interests were at the heart of Manik's journalism. People considered Manik to be a friend.

The mainstream parties, especially the ruling BNP and the opposition Awami League, also expressed 'deep shock' at the murder of the journalist, who used to write against undemocratic governance. Many might have considered the parties' reaction as crocodile tears.

Home Minister Altaf Hossain Chowdhury claimed, on January 21, that Manik was his 'friend'. If it were so, who were the hoodlums of Juba Dal, the youth front of Chowdhury's BNP, who injured six journalists by forcibly entering the Jhalakati Press Club on December 8 last year? One of the six victims reportedly 'remained unconscious for a couple of days' - thanks to the attentions of a Juba Dal leader who mercilessly beat up the journalist for reporting the fact that the leader had assaulted a local engineer on his refusal to illegally award a tender to ruling party activists.

The home minister had also allowed his party men to declare two local newsmen persona non grata in the small district town, "ban" two newspapers there, and file false cases against the reporters concerned the next day.

Sheikh Hasina, president of the opposition Awami League, visited Manik's grief-stricken family in Khulna on Jan 20. She sympathized with the victims, and spoke out loudly in favour of press freedom. But many remembered her past sympathy for perpetrators of various heinous crimes against journalists between 1996 and 2001, when her Awami League was in power?

In one case of assault, Anisur Rahim, editor of a Bangla daily, Sathkirar Chitra, was hospitalized with critical bullet wounds on October 27, 2000. He narrowly escaped death. Armed hooligans, led by a local leader of the erstwhile ruling Awami League, Asadul Haque, had attacked the newspaper office and fired shots that smashed the editor's chair.

The attack came a day after a state minister in Sheikh Hasina's cabinet, Mozammel Hossain, in a speech on October 25 had publicly asked his men to "break the bones" of those reporting on the pilferage of relief materials in the district, which was exposed to a devastating flood.

The Sathkira Chitra was writing critically on the alleged pilferage by the local leaders of the party. When a Dhaka journalist drew her attention, on May 16, 2001, to the alarming rise in killings, assaults, harassments and intimidation of journalists, Sheikh Hasina found a certain amount of justification in atrocities against newsmen.

"As soon as such incidents take place, we take steps. But what is a person supposed to do when he or she is a victim of information-terrorism? Tarnishing the image of a person by writing is not a lesser crime than murder," she observed.

Vested quarters and armed hooligans, especially those belonging to the governing party, resort to killings, physical assaults, intimidation and other such means to silence journalists, particularly those working outside the capital.

They also resort to ransacking newspaper offices and beating up hawkers without being brought to book by the police, which is politically controlled by the party in power, whether it happens to be the BNP or the AL.

Many journalists in Dhaka argue that the big political parties deliberately allow perpetrators of assaults against journalists to go unpunished because they use this as a means of extra-legal control of the media. Since official censorship earns a bad name for the party in power, it always opts for unofficial censorship - censorship or manipulation through intimidation and street power.

Twelve journalists have been killed in the south-western region of the country over the last 10 years. Only two of the cases have so far been disposed of, while the rest are pending in court or are still at the investigation stage.

Police have so far shown as arrested five people in the Manik murder case, although they have "yet to get a clue to the murder". All those who want the killers to be punished are not yet sure whether the police have the freedom or the desire to sincerely investigate the crime.

Karachi and its loyal citizens

Fatima Jinnah road is a quiet place on a Sunday afternoon. It is one of the larger avenues and is more or less unmarked by new edifices and ugly, modern skyscrapers, thus safeguarding the subdued elegance of the quaint structures to be found there.

On one side of the road is the American consul-general's residence and the PACC. Further down towards Cantonment, one may even discover old colonial style houses, some still maintained by families whose forefathers resided there in pre-partition days.

Opening on to this road is one of the gates to the grounds of the city's most distinguished building, Frere Hall. Those who have visited the weekly book bazaar held every Sunday within the compound surrounding that prominent structure will agree that a Sunday afternoon's expedition to the Frere Hall can (if one has a generous imagination) be equated with a leisurely summer afternoon in a London park.

Children play on the grass while parents sit on a nearby bench eating chaat. Others browse through the books being sold under the large canopy. This wholesome, tension-free and inexpensive experience cannot be found anywhere else in Karachi. There is absolutely no element of hooliganism in the area, as only book lovers come to this neighbourhood for the love of affordable books.

But the fact that such an outing - literary and recreational combined - is to be found in only one place in the entire city of 14 million is in itself lamentable. And this too might have been hijacked by US security staff and FIA if there hadn't been a public outcry against the move.

Frere Hall's distinction dates back to the 1860s. Alexander Baillie in his narrative titled, 'Kurrachee' written at the end of the 19th century, says, "The finest building in the [Saddar] Quarter and perhaps in the whole of Kurrachee is the Frere Hall." Named after Sir Bartle Frere - who had a "warm interest in the province [of Sindh] and in its capital and port - it was to commemorate his services to the town where he had served in the capacity of chief commissioner of Sindh and then as governor of Bombay that the grand structure was commissioned." Built at a cost of Rs180,000, Frere Hall was opened to the public on October 10, 1965.

According to Baillie's sketch of the time, a cast iron band stand was erected later to improve its looks and stone posts and chains were added. The afternoon band used to be a great source of amusement and would attract a sizable crowd. Even today, the setting has been maintained and the grounds host many picnickers and early morning walkers.

Whereas the front entrance of Frere Hall opens today on one of the busiest of the city's main roads leading to Clifton bridge, then there was simply open expanse, with just the Sindh Club in its immediate neighbourhood. In fact open spaces characterized most of Kurrachee's landscape, with the seafront an almost desolate stretch with miles and miles of sand in sight, covered with only a few shanties. Still, Clifton was even then a 'fashionable resort' in summer for the Europeans in 'Kurrachee' as well as those visiting it specifically from Upper India to 'catch a breath of the briny'.

It was even submitted to His Excellency the Viceroy in the early 1800s to name this port city as the capital of the Indian Empire, such was the potential perceived by its early settlers. And now, though Karachi classifies as the business capital of Pakistan, the misshapen designing of the city with its inadequate provision for a support system has left most of its essential services on the verge of collapse.

The few low-cost outings allowed the masses such as walks in the handful of parks existing in the city and the Frere Hall book fair would also be wrecked if ambitious men holding powerful positions were allowed to have their way and if the citizens themselves didn't guard the city's interests. A recent example is of the Gulberg town nazim who authorized the sale of 16 playgrounds and parks of his area in violation of all laws and regulations. If those living in the area had not demanded the city government and provincial ministry to take notice and block the proposal, the deed would have been done. For the moment the situation has been arrested and hopefully will be revoked.

The city's loyal residents, ever-resilient in spirit, working, living and struggling against all odds, will always be there to uphold its rights and may be even succeed in reclaiming the grandeur that Karachi enjoyed a century ago.