Rio de Janeiro: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is seeking a new source of legitimacy while making his first visit to Brazil, a nation that maintains close ties to the US, Israel and other countries trying to halt Iran`s nuclear push.
The Iranian leader is set to meet privately on Monday with Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who called it an honour to receive Ahmadinejad and defended Iran`s right to develop nuclear energy. It`s a much-craved pat on the back from a moderate nation as Ahmadinejad faces intense internal and external political pressure.
"With Brazil he gets more bang for his buck in the sense you`re getting legitimacy from a more mainstream player," said Daniel Brumberg, an Iran expert at the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace. "One would hope Brazil`s diplomacy would be skilful enough to get certain types of messages across to the Iranians and not just give Ahmadinejad the red-carpet treatment."
Ahmadinejad said on Sunday that the two countries may discuss cooperation in the nuclear field, where Iran is under intense international pressure to stop uranium enrichment for fear that it is developing atomic weapons.
"We can build partnerships to build nuclear plants," he said in an interview with Brazil`s Globo TV News. "Our two countries need nuclear power to generate electricity. Both Brazil and Iran are entitled to benefit from nuclear technology."
Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. Ahmadinejad said in Sunday`s interview that critics are politically motivated and believe only wealthy countries should have the technology.
Silva, a deft negotiator whose skills were honed as a union leader, says a new tact is needed with the Iranians. It may not be as embracing as Venezuela`s Hugo Chavez, a close ally whom Ahmadinejad will visit next on his tour of South America. But it also shouldn`t be as punitive as the US or European approach.
"I told President Obama, I told President Sarkozy, I told Prime Minister Angela Merkel that we will not get good things out of Iran if we corner them. You need to create space to talk," Silva said last month.
About 500 people gathered at Rio de Janeiro`s Ipanema Beach on Sunday to protest the visit.
Groups representing gays, Afro-Brazilian artists, Christians, Jews, and Holocaust survivors carried protest banners and a giant cage containing white balloons, which they said is a symbol of Iran`s "repressed values”.
The Iranian leader has called for the destruction of Israel and repeated in Sunday`s interview that homosexuality goes against human nature.
Israel is voicing concern about Iran`s push in Latin America. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman visited Brazil and Argentina in July and Israeli President Shimon Peres visited the same nations last week — the first such high-level visits in decades.
Brazil has the world`s seventh-largest uranium reserves and enriches it for its own nuclear energy program. The nation has flatly said it would not sell enriched uranium to Iran, or any other nation.
In addition to encouraging Brazil to press Iran on its uranium enrichment, the US State Department said it hopes Brazil raises the case of three American hikers being held in Iran after they crossed an unmarked border while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan in July.
Bureau Report
