TEHRAN, 31 October 2005 — Iran will not return to a full freeze of its disputed nuclear fuel activities and Western demands for such confidence building measures are unacceptable, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday.
In a speech to members of the hard-line Basij militia, the president also played down an international outcry over his call for Israel to be “wiped off the map” by insisting what he said was nothing new.
Although the president lashed out at what he called “an illegal occupying regime,” he did not repeat his call for Israel to be destroyed and the Foreign Ministry also kept up its effort to limit the diplomatic fall-out.
But the president, who won a shock election victory in June, maintained his uncompromising stance in the face of Western demands that Iran abandon such technology.
“We support the resumption of work at the UCF (uranium conversion facility) and we will continue,” Ahmadinejad said, rejecting demands that Iran return to a full freeze agreed to in November 2004 in a deal with Britain, France and Germany.
“The previous government backed down in the name of confidence building so much that they voluntarily suspended the fuel cycle,” he complained. “Recently the government realized that this confidence building claim is wrong.”
In August, Iran refused an EU offer of trade and other incentives in exchange for halting uranium enrichment work and resumed uranium conversion.
“The European pretext of building global confidence over our nuclear programs is just a lie — what the West wants is to deprive us from nuclear technology,” Ahmadinejad told a group of high school students in Tehran.
The British government said yesterday that the United Nations and the wider world community must respond decisively to Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be destroyed.
Jose Manuel Barroso, head of the European Union’s executive, later said it was too early to talk about sanctions.
“The position that has been taken by the Iranians is so extreme,” British Defense Secretary John Reid told BBC Television. “(It) is in contradiction to everything that the United Nations stands for. So this is a problem and a challenge for the world community. It is the United Nations which must face up to that, and (UN Secretary-General) Kofi Annan has made it plain that it intends to face up to that.”
Reid said there was no thought of military action. “I don’t think anybody is speaking about military involvement at any level,” he said. “But it is certainly a challenge to the United Nations.”
Iran’s former President Mohammad Khatami yesterday issued a thinly veiled attack against his successor Ahmadinejad. “We should not say things that create economic and political problems in the world,” said Khatami, a pro-reform cleric who for the past eight years had sought to improve relations with the outside world. “We are not on an international quest and we are not here to make other governments conform with our position,” Khatami was quoted as saying by the student-run ISNA news agency.
Khatami did not directly mention Ahmadinejad in his speech, which he gave to gathering at Tehran’s Qur’anic museum, but the comments appeared to be aimed at the new ultra-conservative president.
“I have always said that liberalism should not be insulted. It should be criticized,” Khatami said. “The worst is to criticize liberalism using fascist values and principles in the name of Islam.”
In August, when presenting his new Cabinet to Parliament, Ahmadinejad said “liberal thought justifies and recognizes all abnormalities and deviations and isolates the values defined by religious training such as equality, forgiveness, selflessness, chastity and immaculacy.”
