TEHRAN, Jan 3: Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday criticized the foreign policy of ‘détente’ with the West of his predecessors, an MP said.

Mr Ahmadinejad ‘emphasized that in the past 16 years we implemented a policy of detente and tried to get closer to Europe and to trust them, but this policy achieved practically nothing for Iran’, Kazem Jalali quoted the president as saying.

His comments were published by the official IRNA news agency.

Mr Jalali, who is the spokesman for the parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, said Mr Ahmadinejad made the remarks during a meeting with the commission.

Pragmatic conservative Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was president from 1989 to 1997 and his successor, the reformist Mohammad Khatami, led Iran until last year.

Mr Ahmadinejad did not mention either Mr Rafsanjani or Mr Khatami by name.

However, he said that at the end of the first’s mandate ‘our foreign policy collapsed’, and the second saw Iran ‘alienated from our revolutionary goals and our dynamism decreased in the Islamic world’.

Mr Ahmadinejad was elected in June on a platform of restoring the values of the 1979 revolution.

The controversial hardliner, whose country is suspected by Washington of seeking nuclear weapons, has since drawn international ire by calling the Holocaust a ‘myth’ and describing Israel as a ‘tumour’ that should be ‘wiped off the map’.

  FUEL RESEARCH: Meanwhile, Iran announced it would resume atomic fuel research and development next week, raising the spectre of a fresh showdown with the West, especially Washington, which immediately warned Tehran against following through on the announcement.