Ahmadi-nejad presented a book as a gift to one visiting president. But he gave a plane to another.
He welcomed the president of Armenia, where Now Ruz is no a big deal, but the president of next-door Azerbaijan, where Now Ruz is a major holiday, declined to come.
He managed to insult and demean the president of Afghanistan by giving a speech that contradicted just what the Afghan president had told his people three days earlier.
And while holding a lavish Now Ruz party in Tehran, he downgraded a smaller observance at the United Nations, saying it wasn’t appropriate to celebrate Now Ruz when the Arab world was being upended by crisis.
It was an interesting, if somewhat discombobulated, time.
President Ahmadi-nejad last week hosted the second annual gathering of the leaders of countries that mark the Now Ruz holiday. He drew five presidents.
Serzh Sargsyan, the president of Armenia, attended; the president of Azerbaijan was a no-show. The Azerbaijani president’s acceptance was announced March 17. But when he learned that Armenia’s president would be there, he canceled.
In the main speech to the gathering, Ahmadi-nejad made a point of denouncing the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan—despite the fact that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was sitting right in front of Ahmadi-nejad.
Only days before flying to Tehran, Karzai gave a Now Ruz speech in Kabul in which he said Afghanistan will require a foreign presence so long as Afghans are not well-educated and unable to stand on their own two feet. After that, he said, “The foreigners will leave Afghanistan on their own.”
Five days later in Tehran, Ahmadi-nejad rebutted Karzai’s remarks to his face. “The Afghan people and government are able to provide their country’s security and welfare without the meddling and presence of foreigners,” he said Sunday. He called the Afghan people hardworking and intelligent and offered Iran’s help to boost Afghan security.
The Kabul daily Hasht-e Sobh, published in Dari, the local variant of Farsi, wrote before Ahmadi-nejad’s speech: “Officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran are expected, as usual, to express their dissatisfaction with the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan and expect Afghan officials to remain meaningfully silent.… By acting this way, Iran will put Afghan officials in a passive and defensive position.… One does not expect that anyone will discuss Iranian support for the terrorist Taliban, criticize them or even raise the issue.…
“Therefore, as far as Afghanistan is concerned, participation in the Now Ruz celebrations will be merely symbolic. However, as far as Iran is concerned, the participation of Afghan officials will give Iran the opportunity to propagate against foreign forces, especially American forces, based in Afghanistan by describing them as foreign occupiers and take advantage of the silence of Afghan officials as a testimony to the truth of their claim.”
The government held a very lavish Now Ruz celebration with the five foreign presidents in attendance and lesser representatives of 14 other countries. The colorful event resembled something that the monarchy would have hosted in the days before the revolution.
The presidents came from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turk-menistan, Armenia and Iraq.
But while Iran was hosting a big party for the holiday in Tehran, it downgraded its planned celebration at the UN in New York, saying it was not appropriate to hold a party when the Arab world was being tossed about in such disorder. It did not explain how a party in New York was different from one in Tehran.
However, the state news agency later said the New York party was downgraded when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon bowed out. Tehran saw that as a sleight.
At the Tehran event, Ahmadi-nejad made a presentation of a two-seater aircraft to Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. The local media said it was worth $130,000. A day later, Ahmadi-nejad received Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and gave him a book of poems by Persian poet Abu Abdullah Jafar ibn Rudaki.
With Karzai and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani sitting in front of him, Ahmadi-nejad decried the murderous American interventions in their countries. “They bomb innocent civilians and destroy the infrastructure of other countries in order to dominate them,” Ahmadi-nejad said in a speech televised across Iran, but not into Iraq and Afghanistan.
He said the Americans “loot other nations” and “do not allow other peoples to decide their own fate.”
Now Ruz, he said, sends a “message of peace and justice to the world” while “warplanes, missiles and bombs are symbols of the United States.”
He also proclaimed that Now Ruz “has now become a global phenomenon” and told the Iranian people that it is now “celebrated in many Asian, African, Latin American and Balkan countries.”