New Delhi
6 November 2005
Amidst speculation about his resignation in the wake of the
findings of the Volcker Committee's report on the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, a
combative External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh on Sunday said he was not an
"apologist" for the erstwhile Saddam Hussein regime of Iraq and declared in the same
breath that in the next meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of
Governors in Vienna, he would like to see India take a stand different from that of the
September 24 vote when she voted against Iran.
"If a resolution is placed before the IAEA [in two a half weeks from now], which is more
severe than the last one [and] which says that this matter (Iran nuclear issue) must go to
the United Nations Security Council, I can tell you as foreign minister that my
recommendation to the government will be [to] revise our vote," External Affairs Minister
Natwar Singh said on the margins of the India-Africa Project Partnership 2005 on Sunday
evening.
The minister emphasised that during the voting at the IAEA in Vienna on November 24,
"we will take decisions considering what we think is in our vital national interest." He
said that India had "succeeded" in September in preventing the issue from going to the
UN Security Council.
Not betraying any fatigue or exasperation after a week of hectic activities when he faced
criticism from within his party and the Opposition alike, Mr Natwar Singh chose to depart
from his prepared speech to vent his pique on the controversy dogging him.
"I am not an apologist for the Saddam Hussein Government," he asserted, "The
Congress party in Opposition opposed the Iraq war, it opposed the sanctions imposed on
that country and [opposed] sending of troops to Iraq."
In an oblique reference to the India-US nuclear deal, the minister said that he was hoping
that the deal will be passed by the Congress but, he cautioned, if one side asked the
other to take certain steps "then there are going to be problems."
India, he hastened to add, would keep her commitments and fulfil all her obligations.
"We are doing what we can," he said.
Chiding countries who discovered Muslims and Islam only after 9/11, the minister said,
India had lived with Islam for a thousand years and noted that the psyche of the 540
million Muslims in Africa and another 400 million in the Indian sub-continent had been
hurt by certain events.
Mr Natwar Singh observed that it was time the populations of Africa and India "stand
together" against unilateral intervention in the name of humanitarian causes as was
witnessed in Iraq.
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