ALGIERS • Algeria gave its support to Iran yesterday in the row over Tehran’s nuclear programme, as its guest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran insisted his country would stand firm on the issue.
“Iran cannot talk to countries which do not recognise its right to produce nuclear energy for peaceful means,” Ahmadinejad told a news conference on the second and final day of his visit.
He accused Western powers of mobilising all their energy to isolate Iran on this question but underlined Tehran’s determination to continue efforts to acquire nuclear energy.
His host President Abdelaziz Bouteflika backed Iran in the row over its nuclear power programme, a day after US President George W. Bush again criticised Tehran over the issue.
Bouteflika said it was unacceptable that the legitimate right of a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran) to acquire nuclear technology for strictly peaceful means should be blocked.
Algeria itself has since 1995 had two experimental nuclear reactors, both of which are monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Bouteflika called for “generalised disarmament in the matter of arms of massive destruction, the total ban of nuclear tests and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.”
The Middle East should join Africa and Latin America and become a nuclear-free zone, he added.
Israel is considered the sole but undeclared nuclear power in the Middle East. It has maintained a policy of “ambiguity” over its nuclear capabilities, although it does acknowledge having two nuclear research centres.
The statements by the Iranian and Algerian presidents came just a day after Bush again criticised the government in Tehran over the nuclear issue.
“We will continue to work to isolate it because they’re not a force for good as far as we can see, they’re a destabilizing influence wherever they are,” said Bush.
Iran is engaged in a standoff with the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme. The United States has led the accusations that Iran seeks a nuclear bomb and the Security Council has imposed sanctions demanding that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment.
Four International Atomic Energy Agency officials arrived in Iran Monday for talks aimed at agreeing a framework for future inspections of the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz in central Iran.
Iran has repeatedly refused to yield to the pressure despite two sets of UN Security Council sanctions.
In a hard-hitting new broadside against Israel, the Iranian leader also said “the whole of humankind today has been bruised by crimes perpetrated by Zionists in Palestine, in Lebanon, and in the whole world,” Algeria’s APS news agency reported.
“All those felled as martyrs in the streets of Palestine are our children, all those who are rotting in Israeli jails are our children and our mothers and fathers,” he said, while visiting veterans of Algeria’s independence war.
“We support all those Palestinians, Lebanese, North African Arabs and people in Africa, Asia and Latin America who today are fighting a battle with the global hegemonists,” he added.
Ahmadinejad, who in 2005 made waves by calling for Israel to be “wiped from the map”, continued his attacks in a hard-hitting interview published just ahead of his visit.
