IRAN VEHEMENTLY REJECTED PGCC CLAIMS ON PERSIAN GULF ISLANDS
By IPS Diplomatic Correspondent Nina Kamran
TEHRAN-WASHINGTON 2ND Jan. (IPS) Iran rejected categorically the (Persian) Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) for backing the United Arab Emirates (UAE) "unfounded" claims on three Persian Gulf islands Tehran says are "integral and indivisible parts" of its national territory but at the same time reiterated its "readiness" for holding "friendly talks" with the Sheikhdom.
The communiqué, released Sunday in Manama, the Capital of the Sheikhdom of Bahrein at the end of the six-members Council’s Summit, fully endorsed the claim by the UAE on Abu Musa and the Greater and Smaller Tunbs and urged Iran to accept the dispute to be referred to the International Court of Justice.
Occupied by Iran in 1971 on the heel of the British forces withdrawal from the area, the islands, two of them uninhabited, are located strategically at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, overlooking the Detroit of Hormuz.
Iran has a large naval and airbase on Abu Musa, where UAE citizen enjoy special rights and privileges, including to run their own schools.
The declaration assured Abu Dhabi of the Council’s "support for its right to the three islands and reiterates GCC "refusal" to go along with their occupation by Iran."
The leaders underlined the "full sovereignty of the UAE over the islands, an integral part of the Emirates," and asked GCC foreign ministers with examining "all possible peaceful ways of allowing the UAE to regain the three islands."
"We regret that these countries have unreasonably and out of international standards and regardless of neighbourly amicable relations, have raised certain claims against the territorial integrity of Iran and its territorial waters", the official news agency IRNA quoted the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s senior Spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi told a press conference here Monday.
Voicing their backing of the measures undertaken by the UAE to regain sovereignty on its occupied islands peacefully, the leaders of GCC also invited Iran "to accept" referring the dispute to the International Court of Justice."
Asefi described the GCC’s statement that urges Iran to end its "occupation" of the islands "devoid of any realism and lacking spirit of co-operation".
Reiterating that the islands were "integral parts" of Iran, Asefi, who is of Iraqi origin, rejected any "interference" by other parties in its row with the UAE, but added that Iran was ready to have direct negotiations with the UAE on the basis of the 1971 memorandum and an April 1992 letter by Emirates Sheikh Zayed "without any preconditions".
Asefi said that Iran couldn’t accept a committee set up by the six-member council without seeking any consultation from the Iran, and merely based on domestic mechanisms.
"The committee has always proved to be biased", he said.
"Anyhow," he added, "if the committee is making efforts to encourage us for consultation, we welcome it", IRNA reported from the press conference.
However, tension in the region had decreased noticeably after the spectacular rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia that followed the election of Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami as Iranian president and his policy of détente.
Iran was also angered at the fact that the GCC leaders put Tehran and Baghdad on the same level by urging both Iraq and Iran, the two Muslim neighbours who fought for eight years a bloody and devastating war, to show "peaceful intentions" towards their neighbours.
While calling on Iran to seek "friendly solution" to the dispute with the UAE over the islands, the communiqué invited the ruthless Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to "prove its peaceful intentions towards its neighbours", especially Kuwait, which he attacked and briefly occupied in August 1990 to February 1991, when an international force led by the United States and including several Arab nations booted him out and forced him into an unconditional surrounder.
Asked by the Persian service of Radio France Internationale (RFI) why the GCC has placed Iran and Iraq in the same basket, Dr. Mahmud Tale’, an Iranian professor of international politics expressed astonishment, as, in his opinion, contrary to Iraq, Iran had never been a real threat to its neighbours.
"While present members of the GCC had thrown all their might and finances behind Iraq against Iran during the war, and as reward, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were attacked by Saddam Husein, Iran had never taken any hostile act against them", Dr. Tale’ said.
Like him, other Iranian political analysts and observers think that forces hostile to Islamic Republic encourage UAE’s aggressive attitude towards Iran.
"Not only this dispute would never end, but worse, it would hang over Iran like a Damocles sword. Just suppose that UAE landing forces in Abu Musa. In case Iranian forces evicts the invaders, the least they would have to do, and a war follows, the United States, Britain, France as well of some Arab nations like Egypt that have defence pacts with most of the region’s Arab sheikhdoms, including the UAE would intervene", Mr. Tale’ pointed out.
Iranian experts said closer and tighter military co-operation with Moscow would provide a "golden" opportunities for "professional provocateurs" to "frighten" traditional rulers of the region against Russian entrance in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, from where transits more than 40 per cent of the worlds needs for oil.
At the end of a "historic" visit paid last week to Iran by the Russian Defence Minister Marshal Igor Sergeyev, Tehran and Moscow announced a wide-range of co-operation in defence, intelligence and political fields, including the formation of Iranian military cadre and personnel in Russian military academies.
Russia is also completing a nuclear power plant in Busher, on the Persian Gulf, home for one of Iran’s largest air and naval bases.
Washington and Tel-Aviv say the plant would allow Iran to build its own atomic bomb, but Tehran and Moscow insist that the project is for peaceful cvilian use and is placed under surveillance of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Organisation.
The GCC has approved a 70 million-dollar telecommunications and early warning system project to link the military headquarters of all six countries but has yet to implement the plan, and is also examining a radar network project worth 88 million dollars.
The countries already have a joint defence force called "Peninsula Shield", which chiefs of staff last month considered raising the size from 5,000 to 22,000 troops.
The force, created in 1986, is headquartered at Hafar Al-Baten, in northeastern Saudi Arabia, but it did not intervene when Iraq overran Kuwait in a few hours in 1990.
Despite arms purchase worth billions of US Dollars, the oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies depend on defence pacts they have signed with, respectively and by order of importance and size, the United States, Britain and France, granting them military facilities.
Elsewhere, the organisation, which accounts for 45 percent of the world's oil reserves and provides around 20 percent of the world's crude, also vowed to "take all the necessary measures to ensure oil market stability" by backing OPEC production cuts at the cartel's ministerial meeting due in Vienna on January 17.
Formed in 1981 at the height of Iran-Iraq War, the loose GCC is composed by Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. ENDS GCC IRAN 2101