The former Iranian ambassador to Hungary and Cyprus stressed that Iran should introduce itself as a country with the capacity to supply energy to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
In a phone call interview with "Rouydad" program, Ali Akbar Farazi noted that the SCO is considering multilateral economic, cultural and regional cooperation; “Iran has something to say in all these three fields.”
He emphasized that it’s necessary for us to set a plan accordingly, and an institution should be established to follow up on relating issues.”.
“We have valuable economic opportunities in the region, and if we exploit them in time, we will achieve good results,” Farazi said.
He continued; “The process of membership in such organizations is not a short-term one, we should note that it’s at least a medium-term process.”
He added; “We are a member of other economic organizations as well and we were one of the founders of ECO. Personally, I was the Deputy Secretary General of this organization for a long time.”
In response to the question why Iran hasn’t a remarkable presence in these organizations, he said; “the reason is the economic form inside Iran. Our domestic economy has many trustees who, in good faith, thwart each other's work and thus can’t achieve their common goal.”
“To join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we should plan and set goals inside. Until today, we tried to become a member of this organization, but today we should consider common areas of cooperation.”
Farazi stressed that the SCO member countries are all energy consumers in the world; “Iran is one of the major energy suppliers. We should focus on this dimension and it should be raised in SCO.”
At the same time, he reminded that lots of economic projects were left unfinished and fruitless due to sabotage. But we should not forget that some projects have not been completed due to domestic mismanagement.”
“(It should be noted that) strategic cooperation isn’t permanent, and other countries are not waiting for us to reach a joint decision,” Farazi stated, “for this reason, when the India-Pakistan pipeline was incomplete, others defined new pipelines with more difficult and costly routes.”
“Most analysts disregard the fact that being a SCO member means ignoring other treaties, but this idea is not true at all,” he mentioned in his interview with Radio Goftogoo.
By Azadeh Khajeh Nasiri
