BAKU, 22 June 2006 — The world’s Muslim countries yesterday backed Iran with calls for nuclear talks to go forward without preconditions, as diplomats closing a pan-Islamic summit in Baku warned of growing Western Islamophobia. The 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference said negotiations over Iran’s controversial nuclear program should resume “without any preconditions” in its Baku Declaration adopted on the final day of a three-day meeting.
The conference, which also addressed concerns of a “growing tendency toward Islamophobia,” said relaunching talks was “the only way to resolve Iran’s nuclear issue.” The United States and its partners — Britain, France, Germany, as well as Russia and China — have made Iran’s suspension of uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities a condition for talks on Tehran’s atomic program.
On Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told journalists in Baku that Tehran would only enter talks “without any preconditions” and had yet decided if it would accept the deal offered by Western governments. Yesterday’s declaration coincides with US President George W. Bush’s visit to Vienna where he is holding talks with European Union countries on a carrot-and-stick package to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear work.
The OIC, an organization spanning from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, expressed concern that the continuing standoff over Iran’s nuclear program could destabilize the region. They warned of “pressure being mounted on Iran and its potential consequences for peace and security in and outside the region,” in a separate “final communique” approved yesterday.
Meanwhile, the OIC called for members to up pressure on European countries to influence the way their schools teach about Islam amid concerns of growing Islamophobia on the continent and demanded pro-Muslim reforms to the United Nations Security Council. The conference “expressed its deep concern over the growing phenomenon of intolerance and discrimination against Muslim communities in non-Islamic countries, particularly in the West.”
The organization’s secretary-general, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, attributed Islamophobia in part to “the rising dominance of the extremist right wing in Europe.” And in its “final communique” the organization called for “the adequate representation of the Muslim world in any category of an expanded Security Council.”
