March 2, 2006	Thursday	Safar 1, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, March 1: Iranian ambassador Mohammad Ebrahim Taherian said here on Wednesday that his country has the right to pursue its nuclear fuel cycle programme but would be prepared to buy the fuel from “a reliable international (fuel supply) system”.

“But such a system does not exist today,” the ambassador told a seminar arranged by retired Gen Mirza Aslam Beg’s FRIENDS think-tank on the hostility Iran is facing on the issue from the West.

Ambassador Taherian said if the US and its allies accepted Iran’s assurances that it was not pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, the Iranian government would send the additional protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that it signed to suspend its programme pending negotiations on it to the Iranian parliament for ratification.

Dr Zafar Iqbal Cheema, an expert on the nuclear issues, said at the seminar that in pursuing its nuclear programme Iran did not breach its obligations under the NPT but the US was intent upon stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear technology.

Last month’s vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for its alleged violation of NPT was a US-led attempt to turn a technical issue into a political issue and slap sanctions on Iran.

Former diplomat Dr Tanvir Ahmad Khan observed that Iran was the target of West’s “civilizational prejudice” but ruled out the US going to war against Iran on the issue and asserted that even sanctions would prove counterproductive.

“Iran is not so helpless Iraq. It has the capability to hit back. It can completely destroy the oil market,” he said.

Dr Khan reminded that Russia and China had great strategic and economic stakes in Iran. Their vote in the IAEA in favour of referring Iran to the UN Security Council meant they would prevent any unilateral action by the US against Iran whom President Bush had designated as part of an “Axis of Evil”.

Japanese ambassador Nobuaki Tanaka challenged Dr Cheema’s defence of Iran’s right to pursue its nuclear programme saying Dr Cheema had assumed that Iran was not in breach of its obligations under NPT whereas the IAEA resolution of February 4 spoke of such breach.

Dr Cheema replied that the lapses by Iran detected by the IAEA were “not substantive but procedural and technical in nature and did not say Iran was developing nuclear weapons” as suspected by the US and its allies.

A leading member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League and former foreign secretary Akram Zaki said the experience of its unilateral and pre-emptive interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan appeared to have sobered the US as it seemed to have “resisted its irresistible impulse to attack” in the case of Iran.

Energy security was the essence of the situation, he said, adding that the US had built up Israel as a bulwark in the Middle East and assisted it in developing nuclear weapons capability.

Now the US has offered nuclear assistance to India openly “which it had been providing quietly since 1964”, he said.

Gen Mirza Aslam Beg wound up the seminar by observing “a major shift” had occurred in the US foreign policy which now seeks containment of China and “radical Islam” in the region.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared Afghanistan to be part of South Asia in order to make the country “the centre of gravity” of its containment policy. That was why Nato forces have been stationed in Afghanistan and Britain was also sending more troops to Afghanistan while planning to out its troops from Iraq.

At the same time Russia and China have been investing politically and economically in Iran to rein in US unilateralism and to promote multilateralism. Russia would protect Iran from the enormous pressure being built up against it by the West, he said.