Iran deal in the right direction

There is no guarantee that the preliminary agreement reached in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 2nd April 2015 between Iran, on the one hand, and the United States and five other world powers, namely, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, on the other, will lead to a final accord at the end of June this year, as envisaged by the parties concerned.

In the US, a lot of Republican lawmakers and some democrats are opposed to it. There are powerful Israeli lobbies in the US who have condemned it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an implacable opponent of any negotiations with Iran from the very beginning, has described the agreement as a threat to the very survival of Israel!

Some of the hardliners in Iran feel that it imposes severe restrictions upon Iran’s nuclear programme and infringes upon the nation’s sovereignty. But the vast majority of Iranians – it appears from media reports – are in a celebratory mood. They are happy because the final accord will lead to the lifting of sanctions pushed forward by the US, the EU and the UN in recent years that have weakened the Iranian economy and brought widespread suffering to the people.

The sanctions were terribly unjust because they were based upon the false premise that Iran was manufacturing nuclear weapons when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which had over years conducted the most intrusive and extensive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities failed to produce even an iota of hard evidence that suggested that Iran’s nuclear programme had some other ulterior motive. It is also important to emphasise that right from the outset Iran’s supreme leaders, first Imam Khomeini and then the current spiritual head, Ayatollah Khamenei, had declared on a number of occasions that manufacturing, storing and deploying nuclear weapons is “haram” ( prohibited) in Islam.

Harnessing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is part and parcel of the national agenda of more than 40 countries – a right recognized under the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) of which Iran is a signatory.To demonstrate in unequivocal terms its total commitment to peaceful uses of nuclear energy, Iran should now lead a campaign to declare West Asia and North Africa (WANA) a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. No country and no entity in the region should be allowed to manufacture, keep or use nuclear weapons. Every country and every entity should be prepared to be subjected to IAEA inspections.

This will put the only state in the region that is known to possess nuclear weapons to the test. Israel should not be treated as a special case in this instance. A nuclear weapons free WANA is the best hope for peace and security for all the states in that region, including Israel.Iran should also campaign to abolish other weapons of mass destruction such as biological and chemical weapons from WANA (West Asia and North Africa). It would be amazing if such a campaign took root in WANA which has witnessed so many wars since the end of the Second World War.

In fact, I had hoped when a revolution took place in Iran in the name of Islam in 1979 that Iran would pioneer a new approach to international relations by championing the cause of a world without war and a world without nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.It may still happen if the agreement of 2nd April evolves into a comprehensive accord at the end of June 2015 and politics in WANA slowly moves in a different direction. (Countercurrents.org)

By Chandra Muzaffar