Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations decided to attend
the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran next week.
The New York Times published an article "U.N. Visit Will Set Back a Push
to Isolate Iran" explaining the meaning of this visit.
"Mr. Ban’s decision to attend the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement,
announced by his spokesman, Martin Nesirky, came despite objections
from both the Americans and Israelis, including a phone call from
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. It was announced a few
days after the new president of Egypt, a country that has long been
estranged from Iran, said he would attend the summit meeting as well,
a decision that had already unsettled the Israelis," the
newspaper writes.
“The extraordinary effort that the Iranian leaders have put into the
summit is intended to showcase Iran’s global role and offer concrete
evidence that the U.S. policy of isolating Iran has failed,” the
newspaper quotes Farideh Farhi, an independent Iranian scholar at the
University of Hawaii. “A case is being made that it is not the ‘global
community’ that has problems with the Islamic republic, as repeatedly
asserted by U.S. officials, but merely a U.S.-led-and-pressured
coalition of countries,” she said. “And ironically the Obama
administration is conceding the point by trying to pressure various
leaders not to attend the meeting.”
Martin Nesirky, the spokesman of Ban Ki-moon, says that Mr. Ban
expected to meet with senior Iranian leaders, including Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. To boycott the invitation from Iran, Nesirky said, “would
be a missed opportunity,” the New York Times cites his words.
