THE Chinese and Russian representatives at a meeting of the five permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council and Germany on Monday night in London, agreed that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should ‘report’ Iran to the UN Security Council. The permanent members of the Council are the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.
This is a capitulation by the Stalinist regimes in Beijing and Moscow to the demands of the US and European Union (EU) imperialists. Their claim that there is a difference between ‘reporting’ Iran to the Security Council, rather than its ‘referral’ to the Council, is playing with words.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao were said to be opposed to action against Iran over its nuclear programme, but the Russian leaders provided a deal whereby uranium enrichment for Iran would take place in Russia.
Having taken that step towards fulfilling imperialism’s demands on Iran, depriving that country of the right to develop nuclear technology itself, Russia and China have gone all the way. They have opened the way for the US and EU to get the UN Security Council to take action against Iran.
Russia and China agreed that Iran’s nuclear programme will be discussed at the emergency IAEA board meeting in Vienna on Thursday. This meeting will ‘report’ Iran to the UN Security Council.
Following this the IAEA will monitor whether the Iranian government complies with its demands. If Iran does not capitulate to the IAEA’s US-inspired demands by its next meeting in March, then the IAEA will report on Iran’s non-compliance to the UN Security Council.
This will clear the way for the US and EU imperialists to move that the UN Security Council take action against Iran, imposing sanctions and escalating other hostile activities. This was the path pursued against the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein and prepared the road to war. In the case of Iran, Putin and Hu Jintao have taken the first steps along this road.
The decision taken by Monday’s meeting was clearly welcome news in Washington and London. US President George Bush said: ‘But to the (Iranian) government, our message is that if you want to be part of the family of nations, give up your nuclear weapons ambitions.’
Officials of the British Labour government said the agreement was a significant advance for them.
However, the Iranian government of President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad remained defiant in the face of these threats yesterday. Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani said: ‘Informing the Security Council or referring the Iranian case to it will bring an end to diplomacy and that is not at all positive.’
Iran refutes Bush’s claims that it has ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons, insisting that it only wants to carry out nuclear research in order to develop advanced nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, like power generation.
However, the Workers Revolutionary Party believes that Iran has every right to develop nuclear technologies, including building nuclear weapons. Why should only the imperialist warmongers, like the US, Britain, France and Israel, be allowed to have nuclear weapons?
In fact, the only state which has used these horrendous weapons against hundreds of thousands of people is the US, bombing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
And Israel, which has invaded all of the Arab countries around it, uses its nuclear arsenal as a threat to them and to Iran.
States threatened by imperialism are entitled to nuclear weapons as the most effective deterrent for national defence against the imperialists and the Israeli regime.
The WRP has always stood with the peoples of Russia and China, supporting their right to nuclear weapons to defend these workers’ states against imperialism, which has always wanted to reclaim these countries for capitalist exploitation.
The British trade union movement must make a principled stand against Blair’s warmongering government and defend Iran’s right to effective national defence.
The oppressed peoples of the world can see from the experiences of Iraq and Iran that, when imperialist attacks are imminent, the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracies in China and Russia support imperialism and betray the masses.
That is why workers and the labouring masses worldwide must build revolutionary parties, sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to organise the struggle to overthrow imperialism and disarm it at its centre, in the US and Europe.
