Source wikinews.org
May 8, 2006
It has just been announced that for the first time in three decades, direct, and at least partially public, diplomatic communication will commence between the United States (US) and Iran. Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sent a letter to the U.S. president George W. Bush proposing “new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation of the world”.
Mr Gholam-Hossein Elham did not say if the letter mentioned the nuclear dispute, one of the diplomatic problems currently straining relations between Iran and the USA. This information has arrived one day after the Iranian parliament had announced that it might retract from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) if Western pressure over its programme was to increase.
President of the USA George W. Bush
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President of the USA George W. Bush
Differing reports have been made as to whether or not the letter will be made public, and if so, when. In its online report of 8 May 2006, 09:25 GMT, the BBC quoted Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi as saying that the contents of the letter would be made public once Bush had received it. The updated version of the report of 8 May 2006, 14:52 GMT, quotes Asefi as saying that the contents would be made public “at the right time”. An ABC report quoted Gholam-Hossein Elham as saying “it is not an open letter.”
Iran’s foreign affairs minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, delivered the letter to the Swiss embassy in Tehran on Monday.
U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said “this letter isn’t it. This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort.”
“It isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing with in a concrete way,” she added.
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Ahmadinejad sends letter to George W. Bush
John R. Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, also read the letter saying, “I think it is typical of Iran that when major decisions are about to be taken … that they have tried to throw sand in the eyes of the proponents of the action. That’s what this may be.”