Tag: Ahmedinejad

  • Ahmadinejad Cancels Visit to Turkey

    Ahmadinejad Cancels Visit to Turkey

    TEHRAN, Iran December 17, 2012 (AP)

    An Iranian semi-official news agency is reporting that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has canceled a visit to Turkey.

    Mehr’s Monday report said the cancellation was because of the president’s busy agenda. But the decision comes during a dispute over the deployment of NATO Patriot missiles in Turkey.

    Ahmadinejad was supposed to have a one-day visit Turkey on Monday to meet Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of a ceremony commemorating the 13th century poet Jalal al-din Rumi.

    The Pentagon has announced it will send two batteries of the Patriot anti-missile system as part of a larger NATO force to protect Turkish territory from potential Syrian missile attacks. Iran warned Saturday against the deployment.

    The report quotes Mohammad Reza Forghani, director of international affairs of the president’s office.

    via Ahmadinejad Cancels Visit to Turkey – ABC News.

  • Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemns an anti-Islam film as well as extremist reactions to it

    Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemns an anti-Islam film as well as extremist reactions to it

    Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemns an anti-Islam film as well as extremist reactions to it

    via Video – Breaking News Videos from CNN.com.

    ‘Kimsenin Ölmesini İstemiyoruz’

    “Yüce Peygamberimizi küçük düşürmeye çalışmak yeterince kötü bir davranış. Bunun özgürlük ve ifade özgürlüğüyle alakası yok.” diyen İran Cumhurbaşkanı Ahmedinejad, bu gösterilerden dolayı dünyanın hiçbir yerinde insanların yaşamını kaybetmesini istemediklerini de söyledi.

  • Turkey’s New Activism in the Former Ottoman Lands and Continuing PKK Attacks

    Turkey’s New Activism in the Former Ottoman Lands and Continuing PKK Attacks

    “… [I] contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman, one of America’s most famous poets. It’s hard not to think of those words while considering Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s positions.

    Erdogan recently slammed the West, saying that imperialist forces would never give up their ambitions. Yet his country agreed to host a missile early warning radar system for NATO, a military alliance to which all of those targeted imperialist countries belong — along with Turkey.

    The PKK, a separatist Kurdish terrorist organization, today launched one of its deadliest attacks in decades, and the Erdogan government implicitly slammed the Western powers for making it easy for the PKK to continue its murders. Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s chief EU negotiator in charge of overseeing his country’s entry into the EU, called the EU Ambassador to Turkey, Marc Pierini, to ask the EU countries not to tolerate terrorism and grant it a gray area to manipulate minds. Yet no one called either Iran’s or Syria’s ambassadors to the Turkish Foreign Ministry to discuss the matter.

    Furthermore, Turkey’s fight against terrorism, or its attempts to bring a peaceful end to the Kurdish dilemma can not and should not be considered separate than the massive changes occurring at Turkey’s borders. With America seemingly losing its influence in the Middle East and Europe drowning in a terrible economic crisis, the Arab world agonizes over its lack of democracy and economic development. In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, citizens have overthrown longtime dictators, but the path ahead is unclear. The world seems stuck — politically and economically.

    Turkey, with its unique position between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, can and should extend itself to both sides. The problem is that Erdogan’s government is trying too hard to motivate change in the region, with the attitude that it can fix everything. Yet it got lost in its priorities, and its balance. This new Turkish activism in the old Ottoman lands has brought nothing substantive. The government has made it a policy to have “zero problems with neighbors,” but Turkey now has problems with everyone on its borders.

    Turkey invested courageously in its relationship with Syria and Iran. Without Erdogan’s support, Syrian President Bashar Assad would never have been able to end his country’s isolation after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Turkey also tried to bridge the gap between Syria and Israel, but talks collapsed after Israel’s Gaza military operation. Erdogan took that breakdown personally, and cranked up his criticism of Israel.

    Erdogan’s strong Islamist roots, coupled with Turkey’s mixed identity as a Western-oriented secular democracy, created conflict about which direction the country should take.

    A confidential cable from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara on Feb. 25, 2010 — which was published by Wikileaks — offers a partial answer: Turkey was playing a double game. In the cable, the Undersecretary of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Feridun Sinirlioglu, “contended Turkey’s diplomatic efforts are beginning to pull Syria out of Iran’s orbit.” Erdogan’s government failed not only in its effort to drive a wedge between the two countries, but also to prevent the Assad regime from murdering its own people. And despite his close personal relationship with Assad, Erdogan now strongly condemns Syria. And despite the United Nations’ failure to impose sanctions on Damascus after its crackdown on anti-government protesters, Erdogan announced that Turkey would put its own sanctions in place. Ankara is also actively engaging with the Syrian opposition. Was Erdogan trying to shore up Turkey’s ties in its Muslim neighborhood to benefit Western interests?

    Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has publicly criticized Turkey’s cooperation with NATO. “The shield will be stationed in Turkey mostly to save the Zionists so that [the Western powers] will be able to react and prevent Iran’s missiles from reaching the occupied territories in the event they take a military action against Iran and Iran launches a missile attack reciprocally,” the Iranian president said. The Tehran Times reported on Sept. 28 that “Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi criticized the stance that Turkey has recently adopted toward regional developments and said, ‘Turkey is stabbing Muslims on the back.’” Yet Turkey and Iran announced this week that they are consulting on building gas-fueled power plants in Iran.

    What seems feasible geo-strategically might not necessarily be the same as the actual outcome later. Erdogan is getting tremendous media coverage, but this double game could backfire and hurt Turkey’s regional position and economic wellbeing. In fact, today’s PKK attack should make everyone reconsider as to whether the Erdogan government’s new activism in the Muslim world helped to strengthen its security and national interests.

    Further, Erdogan also has said he considers Israel’s nuclear weapons a threat to the region. If Israel has nukes, he argues, why shouldn’t Iran? While this public rhetoric creates the perception that Turkey does not care whether Iran goes nuclear, that certainly isn’t the country’s position. The Erdogan government likes to use Israel as a scapegoat, and it’s dreaming if it thinks that the Jewish state will either sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or give up its arsenal. Turkey also pushed its position after the Gaza flotilla incident, insisting that Israel apologize, pay compensation to the victims’ families and lift the naval blockade of Gaza. The U.N. report — initially prepared at Turkey’s request — found Israel’s position legal.

    Turkey faces a real dilemma between stoking its own international popularity and dealing with the domestic implications of its foreign policy. For example, when the 11 Palestinian prisoners including one woman, whom Israel did not want to see free at its borders, arrived to Ankara early Wednesday morning, as part of the swap deal that rescued the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the Turkish politicians made it clear that those newly released Palestinians acts against Israel do not constitute “terrorism.” One has to wonder, however, how the Turks will explain it to their younger generations as to how to make the distinction between those acts of violence that could be justified. Turkey once argued that there is no good or bad terrorist, but a terrorist is a terrorist. And Turkey’s growing ties to Hamas and others alike in the region will only make it difficult for the Turkish security forces to give less casualties in the fight against terrorism.

    Tulin Daloglu

    Free-lance writer, foreign policy analyst

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/turkey-pkk_b_1019553

  • Explosion hits Iran refinery just before Ahmadinejad speech

    Explosion hits Iran refinery just before Ahmadinejad speech

    By Borzou Daragahi Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

    May 24, 2011, 3:31 a.m.

    Reporting from Beirut—

    Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a May 9 news conference in Istanbul. (Murad Sezer, Reuters)
    Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a May 9 news conference in Istanbul. (Murad Sezer, Reuters)

    An explosion blamed on a gas leak struck a newly inaugurated section of an oil refinery Tuesday just before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at the facility’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, state media reported.

    At least one person was killed and up to 25 were injured by the explosion in Abadan, in Iran’s oil-rich southwest, according to accounts by domestic Iranian news agencies. One Abadan resident quoted by the Associated Press said he saw rescue vehicles rushing to the site.

    The incident did not disrupt Ahmadinejad’s speech, which included fairly typical denunciations of U.S. relations with Middle East autocrats and the course of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, according to news agencies.

    Officials quickly insisted that blast was the result of an industrial accident and not an act of sabotage. Iran’s industrial sector has long been riddled by deadly accidents, with train and plane crashes, troubles at petrochemical facilities and other incidents.

    According to the semi-official Mehr news agency, the explosion and fire were caused by a gas leak, which poisoned oil workers.

    An uprising by the country’s ethnic Arab minority, which was inspired by pro-democracy movements across the Middle East and brutally crushed by authorities, has also been smoldering in the country’s southwest.

    At least one official all but accused Ahmadinejad, who had recently appointed himself caretaker oil minister amid howls of protest by his many political rivals, of rushing to open the plant too early in order to ingratiate himself with Iranians. The refinery will eventually produce 1.5 million gallons of gasoline a day to satiate Iran’s energy-hungry consumers.

    Hamid-Reza Katouzian, head of parliament’s energy committee, told the semi-official Fars news agency that experts had warned officials that Abadan was not ready to launch.

    “There was a technical fault at the refinery,” he was quoted as saying. “The incident was not deliberate sabotage.”

    daragahi@latimes.com

    via Iran, Ahmadinejad: Explosion hits Iran refinery just before Ahmadinejad speech – latimes.com.

  • UN chief, Iran President meet

    UN chief, Iran President meet

    Ahmadinejad Ban Ki Moon 190910The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met in Istanbul on Monday with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the margins of the Fourth United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries, IRNA reported.

    The UN chief and the Iranian President agreed on the importance of the LDC Conference, and the need for a positive outcome, a press release issued by the UN Information Center (UNIC) said here on Tuesday.

    The two officials discussed the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain.

    The secretary-general highlighted the importance of Iran continuing negotiations with the E3+3 on the country’s nuclear program and cooperating fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also asked the President to cooperate with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, including on a potential visit by the office to the country.

    via UN chief, Iran President meet | Iran | Trend.