Iran strengthens ties with the SCO speaks of united front against the West

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday joined the Chinese and Russian leaders in a rare encounter at a summit in Kazakhstan, where he launched a new attack on the “slavers and colonizers” of the West. Host Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev urged the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security group regarded as a NATO rival founded in 2001, to take a more active role in ensuring regional security. But most attention was focused on Ahmadinejad, who was absent from last year’s SCO meeting in Tashkent after the UN Security Council agreed sanctions against Iran and was making a rare appearance at a big international meeting. In a characteristically firebrand speech peppered with rhetorical questions, he launched a new call for a wholesale shake-up of the world order, which he said was “managed and run by slavers and colonizers of the past. I believe together we can reform the way the world is managed. We can restore the tranquility of the world,” he said. Turning to his audience of ex-Soviet and Asian leaders he asked: “Have any of us used an atomic bomb against the defenseless citizens of any other country?” -AFP