Iran and Russia: friends reunited?

Dilip Hiro
October 18, 2007

History has a habit of repeating itself. Consider the case of relations between
Moscow and Iran. In November 1978, as the anti-shah movement gathered momentum in Iran amid rumours of impending American military intervention on the shah's behalf, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev publicly warned America against interference in Iran's internal affairs. This compelled Washington to deny that it had plans to that effect. Such a statement inadvertently worked for the revolutionaries and against the shah, whose regime fell three months later.

Fast forward. On October 16 2007, during his visit to Tehran, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, "We should not even think of making use of force in this region [of the Caspian Sea]." This was an undisguised warning to the United States against military strikes on Iran at a critical moment in the Tehran-Washington relations.

Since the overthrow of the pro-American shah, the Kremlin has maintained a benign stance towards the post-shah regime in Tehran.

Describing Iran's revolution as "a major event on the international scene in recent years", Brezhnev said: "However complex and contradictory, the Iranian revolution is essentially an anti-imperialist revolution, though reaction at home and abroad is seeking to change this feature".

That assessment has been the bedrock of the policies that the Kremlin has followed since then.

When relations between the US and Iran, ruled by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, soured after American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran in November 1979, Moscow aided Tehran materially and diplomatically.

Active economic cooperation between the two neighbours sharing a long frontier started the following month. There was a dramatic increase in railway traffic at the border town of Julfa, with 300 freight cars arriving daily from the Soviet Union.

In January 1980 when Washington's resolution calling for economic sanctions against Iran at the United Nations security council won 10 votes out of 15, Moscow vetoed it.

Eight months later when Iraq, ruled by President Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran, the Kremlin deplored its action. Pravda, the official organ of the ruling Communist party, said that the Iran-Iraq war was "undermining the national liberation movement in the Middle East in its struggle against imperialism and Zionism".

Moscow stopped supplying arms and spares to Iraq. It reversed its position only in June 1982 when Iran gained the upper hand in the war and seized Iraqi territory. The end of that conflict six years later provided Soviet diplomacy greater flexibility in its relations with Iran.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its state-sponsored religion of scientific atheism in 1991, Iran's list of two "arrogant powers" (a code phrase for superpowers) came down to one: America.

Its relations with Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, warmed considerably. They signed agreements on commercial, economic, scientific and technical cooperation.

In the latter fields, nuclear technology was one of Russia's most successful exports; it had made inroads in several countries, including China and India. It now considered the proposal of rehabilitating and finishing a nuclear power plant near the Iranian port of Bushehr, originally started during the shah's rule and interrupted by the revolution and war.

In 1994 Iran signed an $800m contract with Moscow to rebuild two 1,000MW light water, nuclear-fuelled generators. To expedite the project, the initial plan of Iran being a partner in the construction was changed in 1998 to a turnkey arrangement.

By then Iran and Russia had cooperated actively to bring about the end of the five-year civil war in Tajikistan, a former Soviet central Asian republic, in 1997. Then they went on supply arms to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

The Bushehr power plant is almost ready, but the nuclear fuel has yet to arrive from Russia for it to start functioning. Apparently, the shipment of the Russian fuel is tied to Tehran answering satisfactorily half a dozen questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency - a process expected to end by December.

But that did not stop Putin from declaring in Tehran that Russia and Iran planned to cooperate on space, aviation and energy issues. "Russia is the only country that is helping Iran to realise its nuclear programme in a peaceful way", he added.

In sum, the Kremlin's bear hug of Iran is a long-established posture.

Source: The Guardian

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dilip_hiro/2007/10/iran_and_russia_friends_reunit.html