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After thinking and reading about prospects for the Non-Aligned Movement
summit Tehran will be hosting next Wednesday and Thursday, I somehow remembered
an old Arabic saying:
من حضر السوق باع واشترى
or
“Once
in the marketplace, you either sell or buy”
If
so, then I frankly don’t see what multinational issues of value – chiefly the pogrom
in Syria, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Gulf security -- can be “sold” or “bought”
at the upcoming Tehran bazaar.
The conference will
transform Tehran, which this week takes over the three-year rotating NAM
presidency from Egypt, into a hub for hundreds of diplomats, including several
heads of state.
They range from UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to Egypt’s newly elected President Mohamed Morsi to
Armenian President Serzh Sarkgsyan to Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
Al-Thani to Lebanese President Michel Suleiman to Sudanese President Omar
al-Bashir, who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court.
Yet, short of a coup de
théâtre,
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will stay away and let his Iranian opposite
number Mahmud Ahmadinejad do the talking on his behalf.
Tehran has already started
using the time in the spotlight to show Iran is not isolated and to prepare
the ground for giving Assad a shot in the arm.
"Iran hosting the
Non-Aligned conference is an opportunity to break the notion of sanctions and
this false claim by Islam's enemies that Iran is isolated," said Sayyed
Hassan Aboutorabi-Fard, parliament’s deputy speaker, in a sermon at Friday
prayers.
The summit comes as the
United Nations and the West have increased sanctions on Iran over its
controversial nuclear program.
Ms Raghida Dergham, filing
yesterday from New York for pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, says Ban Ki-moon “placed
himself between the hammer and the anvil” by deciding to attend the NAM
conference in Tehran.
In his speech to the
conference, would Ban tell the host country in the face to come clean on its
nuclear program and stop ignoring UN Security Council resolutions and International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warnings?
Would the UN chief
repeat what he had told al-Hayat in a previous interview that Assad has “lost
his legitimacy”?
An analysis of a UN
General Assembly vote on August 3 condemning the Assad regime’s use of force
against its own people showed that 70 of the 120 NAM members voted in favor and
only eight voted against with Syria, Iran, China and Russia.
Iranian Foreign
Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in remarks published Friday his country -- which
describes Syria as part of the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel that it
would not allow to be broken and stands accused by Washington of building and
training a militia in Syria to prop up Assad -- would submit a proposal to the
conference to end the Syria crisis.
"[Iran] has a
proposal regarding Syria, which it will discuss with countries taking part in
the NAM summit," Fars and Mehr news agencies quoted Salehi as saying on
state television.
"This proposal is
an acceptable and rational one, which includes all parties. Opposing it will be
very difficult," the minister was quoted as saying.
Salehi renewed an
Iranian offer to host talks between Damascus and the opposition after the NAM summit
and the annual UN General Assembly meeting in September.
He said a
"significant part of the Syrian opposition" was ready to participate
but did not specify which opposition groups.
Lebanon’s pro-Assad
daily al-Akhbar
reports on its front-page today that the Iranian proposal “includes in part the
formation of a national unity government that will bring together the two
warring parties in Syria. But any oblique reference to the president (Assad)
will neither be made or tabled by the Iranians who consider the subject taboo
altogether.”
Editorially, Kuwait
University professor and Gulf security expert and published author Zafer
M. al-Ajami, writing for Bahrain’s daily al-Watan, believes leaders of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) grouping Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar
and the United Arab Emirates should shun the NAM summit in Tehran.
Among the reasons Ajami
puts forward: (1) The GCC leaders’ chances of diplomatic success at the forum
are substandard (2) Their proposed no-show should be explained in a statement
underscoring Tehran’s practices in the Gulf region and its meddling in Gulf
affairs over the past 30 years (3) By attending, GCC leaders would be condoning
the presence of Ban Ki-moon -- who as head of the UN represents humanity’s
conscience -- in a country backing Assad, “the violator of his own people’s
humanity.”
Tariq
Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of Saudi Arabia’s newspaper of records, dubs the
summit of the Non-Aligned in Tehran “an alignment summit” par excellence.
He says the host
country “has been aligned against our
region’s security and stability for decades, not days. The summit also comes at
a time when Iran is aligning itself fully against the Syrian people and in
favor of the Damascus criminal Bashar al-Assad.”
Salehi’s talk of a
Syria initiative that will be difficult to oppose means Iran intends exploiting
the summit to defend Assad “whose forces killed more than 4,000 people this
month alone.”
Alhomayed says even Vali Nasr, “who I once
renamed ‘Vali Washington’,” believes the summit will allow Iran to “end its
diplomatic isolation.”
Accordingly, Alhomayed
writes, ending Iran’s isolation means subscribing to its nuclear ambitions and
its drive to undermine the Arab countries’ political economic and social
interests and to tighten its hold on Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.
What the region needs
to do, Alhomayed says, is challenge the alignment of Russia, China and Iran
against the Syrian people.
“Mere participation in
the Tehran summit is tantamount to alignment against the unarmed Syrian people,
sustaining Iran’s complicity in shedding the Syrians’ blood and supporting Assad,
the Damascus criminal.”
