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Ahmadinejad to visit İstanbul for OIC gathering
The 25th session of the Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation of the OIC, to be hosted in İstanbul, will run from Nov. 5 to Nov. 9. Ahmadinejad will participate in the last two days of the meeting as heads of state and government are scheduled to arrive in İstanbul on Sunday.
On the first day of his visit, Ahmadinejad is expected to have a bilateral meeting with President Abdullah Gül, Iranian officials told Today’s Zaman on Sunday. The Anatolia news agency, meanwhile, noted that the Iranian leader was scheduled to deliver a speech on the last day of the summit, to which heads of state and delegations led by ministers for economy from 62 member and observer countries of the OIC have been invited.
Ahmadinejad’s visit to Turkey will come only days after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s official visit to the neighboring country, which took place last week. It will also come weeks before Erdoğan’s visit to the US on Dec. 7. A White House statement last week said US President Barack Obama looks forward to discussing a broad range of issues with Erdoğan, including “nonproliferation.”
Over the weekend, Erdoğan reiterated that countries opposed to Iran’s atomic program should give up their own nuclear weapons and attacked as “arrogant” sanctions imposed on Ankara’s neighbor.
He also said he wanted the Middle East, and then the whole world, to rid itself of nuclear weapons.
During his visit to Tehran last week, Erdoğan said he backed Tehran’s “right to peaceful nuclear energy,” while calling its approach in nuclear talks with Western powers “positive.”
Iran says the sole aim of its nuclear program is to generate electricity, but Western powers suspect it of secretly planning to produce nuclear weapons and are trying to persuade it to stop enriching uranium.
“Those who criticize Iran’s nuclear program continue to possess the same weapons,” Erdoğan said on Saturday evening in a televised address to the nation. “I think that those who take this stance, who want these arrogant sanctions, need to first give these [weapons] up. We shared this opinion with our Iranian friends, our brothers.”
UN and US sanctions have already been imposed on Iran over its nuclear program, and if current talks fail to produce an agreement, Western powers may push for a further round of sanctions to be imposed on the Islamic republic. Israel is assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal. Turkey, a European Union candidate, has been Israel’s closest Muslim ally, but relations have soured since Israel’s December-January attack on the Gaza Strip.
Ahmadinejad last week praised Erdoğan for his “clear stance against” Israel. Erdoğan also said Turkey wants the Middle East, and in time the world, to be free of nuclear weapons. “We want to live in a region completely purged of nuclear weapons. We want to live in a world in which nuclear weapons no longer exist,” he said. Back in August 2008, Ahmadinejad paid a two-day working visit, again to İstanbul. At the time, the visit had been criticized by Israel, which said it was unfortunate at a time when Western powers were considering fresh sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. But Ankara had said the Iranian leader’s visit was necessary given the failure to resolve the dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program and offered to help resolve the row.
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