Ana Marija Bešker: Disarmament 2012: The Caravan Moves On

And why/ then/ do the troops/ ask/how long and to what edge/do we continue our fight/manly but devoid of sense/because it revolves eternally/around death.[1]

It’s autumn in New York. Ella’s and Louis’s dreamy voices echo in one’s head. They bring the promise of new love and an aching sense of the dreams gone. In the mundane world of international politics autumn in New York brings back the United Nations General Assembly and the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security.

Every year, the First Committee takes stock of the international security and disarmament developments and trends, adopts a number of resolutions on furthering arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament, and recommends them to the General Assembly for adoption. The General Assembly adopts them by consensus or a majority vote. Every year, their adoption brings to the mankind a small measure of promise of some, however limited, movement towards a more cooperative global security, arms reduction and disarmament. But, as the Arab proverb goes, a promise is a cloud, fulfillment – a rain.

Tehmina Mahmood: What Must be Said – Unified Voice for ‘A Just Peace’

On 11 April 2012, a poem appeared in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and in other European newspapers which led to a controversy in the west and definitely would cause concern in the western elite as the poem exposed the flaws in the international political system marred by the western hypocrisy in the name of peace and democracy. German Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass through his poem entitled Was gesagt werden muss – or ‘What Must be Said’ – termed Israel a threat to world peace and exposed the western hypocrisy in dealing with Israel and Iran’s nuclear programmes.

Grass points out that German government’s decision to sell sophisticated submarines equipped with nuclear capability to a country like Israel possessed with nuclear weapons and threatening to go for first strike against Iran prompted him to stand against western discriminatory policies.

Andrey V. Demidov: Russia’s relationship with Iran

We in Russia consider Iran as a very important nation, as a nation that has important influence on the world political climate. We know that during the period of last three decades Iran has achieved a lot in the fields of social development, politics and sports. We do our best to have good relations with Iran as well as with its people. There are almost no political disagreements between Russia and Iran at present. We attach serious importance to the development of mutually beneficial economic and scientific cooperation between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In our view, such cooperation is an important investment for the future.

Our cooperation in the field of nuclear energy is one of the core issues of our bilateral ties and of world politics. We in Russia are partisans of nuclear non-proliferation regime. Iran is a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which in our view is an important component of the present-day international world order.