RUSSIAN ARMS SALE TO IRAN NOT TO BE MENTIONED IN JOINT STATEMENT
By a special correspondent
MOSCOW 9 Mar. (IPS) Russia and Iran have decided not to include military co-operation in the statement to be published at the end of the coming a visit to Moscow by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, the Russian independent Interfax new agency reported Thursday, quoting a Russian diplomatic source.
The statement currently being prepared for Khatami and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to sign on Monday will contain no military clause or even a reference to "strategic partnership", the source has told Interfax.
Iran’s embattled President is due in Moscow on Monday 12 March for his first official visit to Russia, Iran’s major arms purchasing source and purveyor of nuclear and missile technologies. He will be accompanied by a 100-member delegation.
"The presidents will sign the customary framework treaty, indicating that Russia and Iran are developing good relations", the source said, stressing however that Moscow did not rule out reaching an agreement on military-technical cooperation with Iran at a later date.
Though the two leaders are likely to discuss military issues among other subjects during the visit, but Iranian informed sources said such sensitive issues as military purchases and co-operation in nuclear and missile fields are mostly dealt directly by Ayatollah Ali Khameneh'i who, as the regime’s leader, is also the spreme commander of all Iranian Armed Forces and Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, his closest allies.
In fact, the first major arms agreement between Iran and the Soviet Union, worth seven billions US Dollars, which provided the basis for several future arms contracts, was negotiated on June 1989 by Mr. Hashemi-Rafsanjani, then Majles (parliament) Speaker and in charge of negotiating Iran’s arms needs.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited these contracts but implemented them only in part as a result of disagreements with Tehran over the Soviet debt from natural gas it used to import from Iran and Tehran’s financial problems.
Major Russian weapons systems transferred in the decade following the 1989 arms deal included 422 T-72 tanks, 413 BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles, and self-propelled artillery; SA-5 and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs); 12 Su-24 and 24 MiG-29 fighters; and three Kilo-class submarines, along with advanced torpedoes and mines. Most of these items were transferred in the early- to mid-1990s. Of these, the transfer of the Kilo-class submarines and advanced torpedoes and mines caused the greatest concern to Washington, according to Arms Control Association (ACA), an American think-Tank.
Russian sources said the reason for not including military item in the Khatami-Putin discussions is to avoid further pressures by the United States and Israel, the two countries most "obsessed" with Iran-Russia military collaboration, particularly with regard to nuclear issues.
Russia could earn up to seven billion dollars in the next few years from the resumption of military cooperation with Tehran, Iran's ambassador to Moscow was quoted as saying.
The proceeds -- much higher than Russian estimates of potential sales --, would be earned from selling conventional weapons and training specialists, the Iranian envoy Mehdi Safari told Interfax news agency.
Interfax has reported that Iran is interested in buying from Russia S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, Mi-17 combat helicopters and Su-25 fighter planes.
An official in Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev's delegation to Teheran last December, quoted by Iran's state IRNA news agency in December, said future arms sales could be in the long-term worth as much as two billion dollars.
Russia exported a record four billion dollars worth of weapons in 2000.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said defence issues would be part of a strategic alliance between Moscow and Teheran. "It is a large and multifaceted question", Klebanov said. "It cannot be just a matter of a military-technical cooperation pact. You have to address the entire range of our bilateral relations", he further added.
U.S. concerns about the impact of these potentially large arms transfers on Persian Gulf stability and on Israel led Washington to press Russia to put a halt to them. As a result, the two sides signed an agreement in June 1995, under which Russia promised it would fulfil existing contracts by the end of 1999 and would not sign any new ones.
But the agreement, known as the Gore-Chernomyrdin accord, was unilaterally annulled by Moscow in November 1999.
"Notwithstanding the Gore-Cherno-myrdin agreement regarding conventional arms transfers, Russian and Iranian officials reportedly met in early 1997 to discuss new arms deals. These supposedly involved the possible sale of eight Su-25 attack aircraft; 25 Mi-17 transport helicopters; hundreds of T-72 tanks; 500-1,000 SA-16/18 Igla shoulder-launched SAMs; several battalions of SA-10 and SA-12 SAMs; air-surveillance radars; and several other items. Five Mi-17s were indeed eventually transferred to Iran starting in January 2000", ACS’s Michael Eisenstadt said.
Relations between Tehran and Washington were cut after Iranian students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took 55 US diplomats as hostages.
Considering the new Islamic regime of Iran as a source of instability in a region of vital strategic importance, the United Stated imposed arms and oil sanctions on Tehran, forcing the new Iranian turbaned rulers to look for new sources and found North Korea, China and the then Soviet Union, all three major foes of the United States in those years of cold war.
To avert an Iranian victory in the Iran-Iraq War that could have had a destabilising impact on the region, in 1983 Washington organised an international arms embargo on Iran that greatly complicated Iran’s efforts to replace its wartime losses and sustain its war effort.
As a result, Iran emerged from the war greatly weakened, much of its military inventory having been destroyed or captured.
Ever since, and learning from that bloody and ruinous war and the fact that under the Shah’s regime, Iran depended on the United States and the United Kingdom for nearly all its arms, Iran has been seeking to enhance its military capabilities by increasing self-reliance, strengthen deterrence, and achieve the status and influence that it believes is its due in the Persian Gulf region, where, before the Islamic revolution of 1979, it was regarded as the "gendarme".
In the framework of this policy, Iran launched an ambitious effort to rebuild its war-ravaged armed forces, developing close relationship with North Korea, China and Russia in that order.
Iranian and Russian presidents would also discuss the sharing of Caspian Sea bed, with Iran insisting that the lake’s resources, particularly oil and gas, that some experts estimates to be third largest after the Persian Gulf and Siberia, be divided equally between the five costal states that are, besides Iran and Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.
Iran has echoed previous assertions on a 20 percent share in the oil-rich Caspian Sea, stressing the validity of the 1921 and 1940 treaties signed between her and former Soviet Union.
"Iran seeks a 20 percent share, but the 1920 and 1940 treaties are still valid and any legal status for the Caspian Sea should be defined on the basis of the treaties", foreign ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Assefi told a Tehran press conference.
He said that Caspian Sea legal status has become a complicated issue and the five littoral states define their own specific legal status.
The Islamic Republic has repeatedly indicated that it will agree to an equitable sharing of the oil-rich Caspian Sea which would give it a 20 percent share.
He confirmed that the issue would be in Mr. Khatami’s visit to Moscow.
Commenting on Mr. Khatami's visit to Moscow, Assefi said, "Iran considers Russia a strategic neighbour and the visit will certainly have a good impact on Tehran-Moscow relations".
He said that regional and international issues, including the Caspian Sea, Afghan conflict, azarbaijan-Armenia dispute over Nagorni Karabakh and Palestinian crisis are to be discussed.
Itar-Tass news agency had earlier said that Russia and Iran may sign a treaty on the fundamentals of bilateral relations during Khatami's state visit. ENDS IRAN RUSSIA ARMS 9301