BERLIN, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The United States and France are pushing for EU sanctions against Iran if those fail to be agreed upon at the United Nations, but it remains unclear how many other powers in Europe would support such a plan.
If the world needed any further reassurance that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can’t be taken seriously, he delivered it Monday at Columbia University in New York.
Not only did he again question the extent of the Holocaust, he also insisted Iranians had no homosexuals.
When asked why homosexuals in Iran are executed, Ahmadinejad told the crowd, "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it."
When the Iranian president later spoke to Washington's National Press Club via video conference and was confronted with an excerpt from the 2007 Amnesty International Report, saying "freedom of expression and association were increasingly curtailed,” he replied: “People who prepared the report are unaware of the situation in Iran. In our country law prevails. Freedom is flowing at its highest level.”
The latest exchange of words demonstrates how high emotions are flying when it comes to the conflict over Iran’s controversial nuclear program.
The Islamic republic rejects charges from the West that its civilian nuclear program is a disguise to build nuclear weapons; rather, Tehran insists it has the right to independently pursue uranium enrichment as a signatory to the Non-proliferation Treaty.
The U.N. Security Council has adopted three resolutions against Iran, two of which include sanctions because of Iran’s unwillingness to stop enriching uranium.
The French government, up until now strongly tied to the diplomatic process that has tried to negotiate a compromise with Iran, has recently stepped up the rhetoric.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy has lobbied for EU sanctions if the harsher sanctions can’t be agreed upon in the U.N. framework. "Iran has the right to nuclear energy," Sarkozy said Tuesday at the 192-member U.N. General Assembly summit in New York. "But allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons would mean an unacceptable risk for regional and world stability."
In a newspaper interview, Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, even said the West needed to be prepared for “war” in case Iran wouldn’t give in.
Ahmadinejad, in his remarks to the NPC, pointed to the fact Kouchner later took back what he had said. “And secondly the United States and France are not the world, don't speak for the world.”
Yet more governments are apparently ready to back the plan of harsher sanctions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday warned Iran that if it didn’t give in, then “Germany will resolutely lobby for further, harsher sanctions.”
“It is not the world which must prove that Iran is building an atomic bomb,” Merkel said. “Iran must convince the world that it does not want the atomic bomb.”
This is somewhat of a turnaround, given previous reports that Germany would not support the French plans of harsher EU sanctions.
Berlin had been especially unhappy with U.S. and French calls upon Germany to support EU sanctions, German news magazine Der Spiegel said in its latest issue.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier apparently traveled to New York with an information package reminding that several French firms do virtually unchanged business with Iran, while German exports to the Islamic republic have “dramatically decreased,” Der Spiegel writes. Among the French companies that do business with Iran are carmakers Renault and Peugeot, energy firm Total and bank BNP Paribas.
Berlin has even more delicate information: The German Foreign Ministry accuses U.S. companies of continuing to do business with Iran despite the 1979 boycott with the help of bogus letterbox companies in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
That some countries follow the sanctions less strictly than others causes “a gradual squeezing out of German companies from the Iranian market,” one unidentified leading Foreign Ministry official told Der Spiegel.
It is possible Merkel is more willing to support EU sanctions than Steinmeier is; it will nevertheless need Paris and Washington to do some good convincing work to bring Germany on board. Ahmadinejad, given that he continues his aggressive rhetoric against Israel, could help France and the United States in that regard.