Iran Joins Shanghai Cooperation Pact, Hoping To Reduce Isolation
Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) during the group’s virtual summit Tuesday, representing a foreign policy achievement amid its isolation.
Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) during the group’s virtual summit Tuesday, representing a foreign policy achievement amid its isolation.
This is the first time Tehran joins a regional pact since the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
The SCO also known as the Shanghai Pact is a Eurasian political, economic and security alliance formed in 2001 with Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with one of its goals being cooperation against extremism. India and Pakistan joined the pact in 2017 and Belarus is also slated to become a member.
Iran, which has become more isolated from the global economy since the United States imposed sanctions in 2018, hails its membership in SCO as an achievement for its Eastern oriented foreign and economic policy.
The SCO also seeks to expand its influence by accepting more members, although two of its biggest members, Russia and Iran face more diplomatic and economic isolation than ever.
The summit Tuesday was hosted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who emphasized the original mission of the organization to jointly fight terrorism. He also said the world is embroiled in disputes, tensions and the impact of the pandemic and global food, fuel and fertiliser crises are big challenges for all countries.
"We need to think together that are we, as a group, capable of meeting the expectations and ambitions of our people? Are we capable of facing modern challenges?" Modi said. "Is SCO becoming a group that is completely ready for the future?"
Russian President Vladimir Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and leaders of four central Asian countries took part in the online proceedings as well as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
Although Russia and Iran claim SCO will reduce Western influence and can be a vehicle for replacing the US dollar in international trade, Modi visited the United States in June and received a warm welcome.
China does offer trade in its currency yuan, but that is mostly helpful in bilateral transactions with Beijing. Neither the Chinese yuan nor the Indian rupee are considered global hard currencies like the US dollar or the euro.
Also, it is debatable whether Iran’s membership will add much to the influence SCO hopes to have, while Russia has also become seriously weakened not only by sanctions, but also by its invasion of Ukraine and the recent mutiny by the mercenary Wagner group.
President Vladimir Putin reassured others in his address to the summit of Russia's stability and unity.
"The Russian people are consolidated as never before," Putin told the virtual meeting.
"Russian political circles and the whole of society clearly demonstrated their unity and elevated sense of responsibility for the fate of the Fatherland when they responded as a united front against an attempted armed mutiny."
Putin's emphasis on Russia's unity at a meeting with key allies appeared to show how keen he is to remove any doubts about his own authority on the world stage after the short-lived mutiny led by Wagner mercenary founder Yevgeny Prigozhin late last month.
Russia and Iran constantly speak of countering US unilateralism, but the fact is that Europe appears united with the United States in countering Russia’s military adventure and putting pressure on Iran.
China has also been threading carefully and so far, a substantial Chinese backing for the Russian war effort has not materialized.
In Iran’s case, China is buying illicit Iranian oil shipments in violation of US sanctions, but remains unclear how much it pays in hard currency, since Tehran is facing a serious financial and economic crisis.
His tragic death is the latest in a rising tide which has claimed dozens of lives.
Hassanzadeh fell into a coma over ten days ago after having a drink apparently contaminated with poisonous methanol.
Many on social media blame the regime for Hassanzadeh and other victims’ deaths, criminalizing alcohol only driving the production into the hands of unregulated crime gangs and untrained home brews.
Since 1979, it has since caused death, blindness, and other serious injuries to hundreds from alcohol poisoning in various areas of the country every year.
According to a survey by Iran Open Data, half of all adults regularly consume alcohol despite the Islamic regime’s ban, homemade alcohol a common way to skirt the bans. In 2018, a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Iran ninth among 189 countries for alcohol consumption per capita.
The recent wave, however, appears to be much more widespread and has drawn sinister suspicions of state involvement. In Rebat Karim, a working-class town in the south of Tehran, over 40 people have been poisoned in the past month alone, six of whom died.
This has led to allegations that like mass schoolgirl poisonings that started in late November and spread throughout the country until the end of April, the regime itself or religious extremists protected by the regime may be involved in the poisonings.
Police Chief Ahmadreza Radan on Sunday strongly denied suspicions that the recent alcohol poisonings could have been deliberate.
Hassanzadeh was born in 1963 to a working-class Azerbaijani family who ran a fruit-selling shop in the south of the capital Tehran.
![One of Hassanzadeh’s latest collections exhibited in Tehran in 2018 was titled “[Andy] Warhol Saved Me”.](https://i.iranintl.com/images/rdk9umy0/production/97dbf6f79369b73b8a2ed158576ae13cd73c545e-902x606.jpg?rect=0,3,902,601&w=992&h=661&q=80&fit=max&auto=format)
He served as a conscript in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) the experiences of which were later inspired many of his early works as did his observation of the Iranian society and its many complexities.
For years, he worked at his family’s shop while also studying art and Persian literature.
Hassanzadeh’s later works in which he used creative combinations of silk screen printing and ceramics are often characterized as ‘pop art’ and often deal with the everyday life of Iranians and sociological issues such as war, women, celebrities, traditional culture, heroes, family as well as the relation between the Iranian society and the West.
“My pictures are often to do with how east and west see one another,” Hassanzadeh told the Guardian on the phone from Tehran in May 2021.
His series of mixed-media works entitled ‘Prostitutes’ served as a commentary on the Iranian society and paid tribute to the 16 prostitutes killed by a serial killer in the religious city of Mashhad between 2000-2001.
The artists’ works were featured in solo and group exhibitions in Iran and many countries including Britain, Lebanon, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates. Some of these are currently held by British Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Fine Arts, Huston Museum of Fine Arts, Agha Khan Museum in Toronto and Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Arts.
Kuwait’s foreign ministry said in a statement issued Monday, "The State of Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia... alone have exclusive rights to the natural wealth in the Al-Dorra field.”
However, it also renewed its invitation to Iran for talks over their sea borders after Tehran said last week that it was ready to start drilling in the disputed offshore field -- called Arash in Iran and Durra or Dorra by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
"The State of Kuwait renews its invitation to the Iranian side to start negotiations on the demarcation of the maritime borders," the Kuwaiti foreign ministry declared.
Last year, the two Arab neighboring countries agreed to jointly develop the field, which was discovered in 1967 and is estimated to have a total proven reserves of around 310 million barrels of oil and 20 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Saudi Aramco Gulf Operations Company signed a Memorandum of Understanding in December with Kuwait Gulf Oil Company (KGOC) to develop the joint gas field, Saudi state news agency (SPA) reported.
The development aims at producing 1 billion cubic feet of gas and 84,000 barrels of liquefied gas per day, according to the Kuwaiti state news agency.
In the dispute that dates back several decades, Iran claims any development without its consent breaks international laws, saying that 40 percent of the field is located in its territorial waters.
Mohsen Khojsteh-Mehr, the managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company, said last week that "there is full preparation to start drilling in the joint Arash oil field".
"Considerable resources have been allocated to the board of directors of the National Iranian Oil Company for the implementation of the development plan for this field," he said in remarks carried by Iranian state media.
The dispute over the Dorra field stretches back to the 1960s, when Iran and Kuwait each awarded an offshore concession, one to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the forerunner to BP, and one to Royal Dutch Shell. The two concessions overlapped in the northern part of the field, whose recoverable reserves are estimated at some 220 billion cubic meters (seven trillion cubic feet).
Saudi Arabia is also a part of the dispute because it shares with Kuwait maritime gas and oil resources in the area.
Last week, Saudi Arabian Oil Company and TotalEnergies signed an $11 billion contract to build a petrochemicals complex near the offshore field.
Criticizing the Iranian government’s inaction vis-a-vis the project, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Association of Iranian Oil and Gas Drilling Companies Hedayatollah Khademi told ILNA news website in Tehran on June 25, “It seems that we have surrendered the joint fields to the neighbors.”
Highlighting the fact that Riyadh has significantly developed and extracted from joint fields such as Arash/Durra, Farzad-A, Farzad-B, and Forouzan despite the fact that Iran dug the first exploratory wells in the fields., he said, “We have not done anything," accusing the Iranian government of sitting idle in the face of the encroachment.