Ahmadinejad in
President Ahmadinejad spoke to the
UN General Assembly on 25 September 2007.
While he was in New York, he also spoke and answered questions at the National
Press Club in Washington (via a video link) and at Columbia University in New
York, where the University President, Lee Bollinger, heaped abuse on his head
before he spoke. English translations of
his remarks are available on the Washington
Post website at [1],
[2]
and [3]
respectively.
The extracts from his remarks below
are on three themes (1) the UN system (2)
(1) The UN system
The main theme of President
Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2006 was the
inequity of the UN system, whereby the victors of the Second World War granted
themselves veto-wielding permanent membership of the Security Council in 1945 and,
by so doing, rendered themselves immune from sanction by the Council for ever. Yes, built into the UN Charter from the
outset has been the immutable principle that 5 out of its now 192 members
cannot be convicted of any infringement of the Charter, which is why the US/UK
invaded
This theme was repeated in this
year’s speech. Here is part of what he
said, according to the translation at [1]:
“A scientific and careful analysis shows that the root of
the present situation lies in two fundamental factors. Without doubt, the first
factor lies in the relations arising from the consequences of the Second World
War. The victors of the war drew the road map for global domination and
formulated their policies not on the basis of justice, but for ensuring the
interests of the victors over the vanquished nations. …
“Mr President, among all the ineffective bodies,
unfortunately the UN Security Council ranks first. They have created
circumstances in which some powers with exclusive and special right to veto in
the Security Council act as prosecutor, judge and executioner, regardless of
being a defendant or respondent. …
“Let’s look at
“We saw in
“Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, the presence of some
monopolistic powers has prevented the Security Council from performing its main
duty which is the maintenance of international peace and security based on
justice. …
“The General Assembly, as the representative of the
international community, should be considered the most important pillar of the
UN, in order to, free from any pressure and threats by the powers, take
required measures for the reforming of the UN structures, and especially change
the present status of the Security Council and defined new structures, based on
justice and democracy with the purpose of becoming responsive to the present
requirements and to be able to settle existing challenges, heading to the
establishment of an enduring stability and security.”
This is a fine ambition, but it
requires fundamental amendments to the UN Charter to make the General Assembly,
rather than the Security Council, “the most important pillar of the UN” – and,
unfortunately, any one of the 5 veto-wielding members of the Security Council
can, and will, block such amendments.
What needs to happen is that the
Security Council be brought into disrepute as a body capable of dispensing
justice in this world, by pointing continuously to the inherent injustice of a
system in which the 5 most powerful states in the world are immune from
sanction by the Council, while at the same time these states largely determine
the decisions of the Council about the other 187 states. Theoretically, the 10 non-permanent members
of the Council have enough votes to block the permanent members, but this never
happens in practice. In reality, the 10
non-permanent members of the Council are mere window dressing, which give the
appearance to the world that the Council is a representative body when it
isn’t.
The best thing that could happen to
the Council is that states refuse to act as window dressing, that they refuse
to serve as non-permanent members, so that the world would see the reality that
the Security Council is the 5 permanent members - and no other state matters.
Of course, there are proposals in
the air for more “permanent members” of the Security Council. The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan,
proposed two different models for this to the UN World Summit in September 2005
[5] (see
Section IV), but no decision was taken at the Summit on the matter.
Kofi Annan’s proposals originated
from the report of a High Level Panel of international figures, which he set up
in 2003 [6]. Paragraphs 244 to 260 of this report deals
with Security Council reform. Both
models proposed by the High Level Panel increase the membership of the Council
from 15 to 24, but, crucially, neither changes the existing set of 5
veto-wielding powers. In other words, the
proposals are for the window dressing to be enhanced by the addition of a few
states that are always on the Council.
On that basis, all 192 UN members could be made “permanent” members of
the Council without significantly altering the decisions it makes.
I have another suggestion for
bringing the Security Council into disrepute.
It is that the Organization of the Islamic Conference demand 6
veto-wielding permanent seats on the Security Council on behalf of the 1.5
billion Muslims in this world. After
all, the US/EU have 3, with about half the population. If there are going to be veto-wielding
members of the Security Council, they should be spread around.
(2)
At
“hours and weeks and days of inspections in our country, and
over and over again the agency’s reports indicate that Iran’s activities are
peaceful, that they have not detected a deviation, and … they have received positive
cooperation from Iran.” [3]
He continued:
“But regretfully, two or three monopolistic powers, selfish
powers, want to force their word [will?] on the Iranian people and deny them
their right. They tell us, don’t make it yourself, we’ll give it to you.”
However, past experience had made
this option, to say the least of it, unattractive:
“Well, in the past, I tell you, we had contracts with the
“You’ve not even given us spare aircraft parts that we need
for civilian aircraft for 28 years … If you don’t give us spare parts for
civilian aircraft, what is the expectation that you’d give us fuel for nuclear
development for peaceful purposes?”
In his National Press Club
interview, the President was asked a question in similar vein:
“Why will
He replied that, first of all, it
was
“Secondly, two years ago, I made the same proposal you just
… referred to in the United Nations, but those selfish groups that didn’t want
to listen to it did not embrace it.
“And why should a nation tie its future to another group,
another nation? Is the
He did indeed make such an offer in
a speech to the UN General Assembly on 17 September 2005 [7]
(see my article The US/EU fail on
(3) The
Holocaust and
It is widely believed that President
Ahmadinejad has denied that the Holocaust ever took place, that he has denied
that millions of Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis during World War
II. He may have made remarks to that
effect. All I can say is that I haven’t
come across them. Most of the remarks I
have seen have been equivocal, not denying that the Holocaust happened but not
stating that it did happen either.
(Obviously, a major part of the
problem in making a judgement about precisely this is that his remarks are
always in Farsee and, unless you are a Farsee scholar, it is difficult to be
sure that the English translations render his meaning accurately, even if these
translations are published by reputable media outlets.)
In his opening remarks at
“My first question was if -- given that the Holocaust is a
present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not
sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives? …
“My question was simple: There are researchers who want to
approach the topic from a different perspective. Why are they put into prison?
Right now, there are a number of European academics who have been sent to
prison because they attempted to write about the Holocaust or research it from
a different perspective, questioning certain aspects of it.
“My question is: Why isn’t it open to all forms of research?
“I have been told that there’s been enough research on the
topic. And I ask, well, when it comes to topics such as freedom, topics such as
democracy, concepts and norms such as God, religion, physics even, or
chemistry, there’s been a lot of research, but we still continue more research
on those topics. We encourage it.
“But, then, why don’t we encourage more research on a
historical event that has become the root, the cause of many heavy catastrophes
in the region in this time and age? Why shouldn’t there be more research about
the root causes? That was my first question.
“And my second question, well, given this historical event,
if it is a reality, we need to still question whether the Palestinian people
should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in
“But why is it that the Palestinians should pay a price,
innocent Palestinians, for 5 million people to remain displaced or refugees
abroad for 60 years. Is this not a crime? Is asking about these crimes a crime
by itself?”
Clearly, Ahmadinejad’s objective in
this is to draw attention to the fact that the awful acts perpetrated against
European Jews during World War II were done in Europe by Europeans – and it is
unjust that these awful acts have been used to justify the creation, and
territorial expansion, of a Jewish state in Palestine, which could only be done
by the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab people – who bore no
responsibility whatsoever for the slaughter of European Jews. Can anybody deny that an historic wrong has
been done to the Arab people of
The first question Ahmadinejad was
asked at
“Do you or your government seek the destruction of the state
of
He began his reply saying:
“We are friends with the Jewish people. There are many Jews
in
and went on to point out that there
is a seat reserved for them in the Iranian parliament:
“You must understand that in our constitution and our laws
and in the parliamentary elections for every 150,000 people, we get one
representative in the parliament. For the Jewish community, for one-fifth of
this number, they still get one independent representative in the parliament.”
Answering the specific question, he
said:
“So our proposal to the Palestinian plight is a humanitarian
and democratic proposal. What we say is that to solve this 60-year problem, we
must allow the Palestinian people to decide about its future for itself.
“This is compatible with the spirit of the Charter of the
United Nations and the fundamental principles enshrined in it. We must allow
Jewish Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians and Christian Palestinians to
determine their own fate themselves through a free referendum.
“Whatever they choose as a nation, everybody should accept
and respect. Nobody should interfere in the affairs of the Palestinian nation.
Nobody should sow the seeds of discord. Nobody should spend tens of billions of
dollars equipping and arming one group there.
“We say allow the Palestinian nation to decide its own
future, to have the right to self-determination for itself. This is what we are
saying as the Iranian nation.”
So, the answer to the specific question
is Yes –
David
Morrison
Labour
& Trade Union Review
1
October 2007
References:
[1] www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/25/AR2007092501655.html
[2] www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/24/AR2007092401084.html
[3] www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/24/AR2007092401042.html
[4] www.david-morrison.org.uk/iran/security-council-inequity.htm
[5] www.un.org/largerfreedom/executivesummary.pdf
[6] www.un.org/secureworld/report.pdf
[7] www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iran/2005/iran-050918-irna02.htm
[8] www.david-morrison.org.uk/iran/iran-us-eu-fail.htm