As the West continues to urge Israel to let sanctions and diplomacy – including
isolation – play out on Iran, Tehran on Sunday convened the 16th Non-Aligned
Movement summit and immediately began milking the event for propaganda and anti-
Israel purposes.
The Iranian press also used the convention to
demonstrate how the country is anything but isolated.
“Tehran to host 2
kings, 27 presidents, 7 PMs for NAM summit,” was the headline on the official
Fars news agency on Saturday. The headline left out perhaps the most prized
participant – UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon.
The report said that in
total 100 states have announced their participation at different
levels.
There are 120 member countries and 17 observer countries in the
movement.
Delegates attending the first meetings of the conference Sunday
morning were greeted at the entrance to the convention center by an exhibition
of the cars of three Iranian nuclear scientists assassinated in recent
months.
The exhibition, according to the official Islamic Republic News
Agency, “displays the cars carrying martyrs Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, Dariush
Rezaienezhad and Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan when they were assassinated.
The
three scientists as well as Majid Shahriari were assassinated by Zionist regime
elements.”
Another exhibit at the conference, according to IRNA, is one
dubbed “Iran, victim of terrorism,” that shows “in picture the history of
terrorist attacks in Iran, in different languages, after the victory of Iran’s
1979 Islamic Revolution.”
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar
Salehi addressed the opening meeting of the NAM conference by blasting Israel,
saying – according to Fars – that the “tragedy of Palestine” is “the root cause
of conflicts in the region.”
“We, as the main part of the international
community, want a just policy to determine the fate of the Palestinians and
oppose the illegitimate acts of the Zionist regime,” Salehi said. He was quoted
by the news agency as saying that peace in the region is not possible through
support for the Zionist regime’s “blind terrorism, occupation and
torture.”
In an indication of how Iranian officialdom will use the conference for its own purposes, Iranian Defense Minister Brig.-Gen. Ahmad
Vahidi said Sunday that the summit “demonstrates the Islamic Iran’s thriving
power,” despite “all the propaganda launched [by the West] about Iran’s
isolation on the international scene.”
“Surely, holding the summit in
Iran can give more power to the Islamic Republic ruling system and create
abundant opportunities in the international arena,” the minister said, according
to Fars.
NAM was formed in 1961 by countries claiming not be aligned with
any of the major superpowers, and is one of the largest grouping of countries
outside the United Nations.
Iran will hold the rotating chairmanship of
the organization for the next three years.
One Israeli government
official lamented that the summit in Tehran gives the Iranian regime a chance to
“showcase that it is not isolated, to say there is no serous diplomatic
pressure, and to give the regime a chance to show its own people it has friends
and allies.”