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442Il n’est pas besoin d’être grand clerc pour constater que l’Agence Internationale de l’Energie Atomique a changé complètement d’attitude vis-à-vis, ou dirait-on désormais à l’encontre de l’Iran, depuis le départ de l’Egyptien Mohamed ElBaradei en 2009. Il n’est pas besoin d’être grand enquêteur pour constater que son successeur, le Japonais Yukiya Amano, élu avec le soutien et les pressions des USA et du reste du bloc BAO, favorable aux USA et au bloc BAO, agit comme un agent du bloc BAO à la tête de l’IAEA, contre l’Iran.
... Cela n’empêche qu’un peu de documentations diverses sur le cas est bienvenu. Le long article du Guardian du 23 mars 2012, nous en fournit en bon nombre et en qualité acceptable, qui dissipent les derniers doutes qu’on pouvait entretenir dans cette affaire. Retrouvant un peu de sa verve antiSystème des années 2002-2010 (les années Bush, qui n’était pas du bon parti, et les quelques illusions du début du mandat Obama), le Guardian fait œuvre utile à cet égard. (Il nous précise même que Yukiya Amano, sans doute en remerciement des services rendus, a pu également tenir un rôle remarquable en faveur des autorités japonaises, de leurs opérations de dissimulation et de leur politique nucléaire, lors de la catastrophe de Fukushima.)
«The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog at the heart of the growing Iranian crisis, has been accused by several former senior officials of pro-western bias, over-reliance on unverified intelligence and of sidelining sceptics. Yukiya Amano, a veteran Japanese diplomat, took command of the IAEA in July 2009. Since then, the west's confrontation with Iran over its nuclear programme has deepened and threats of military action by Israel and the US have become more frequent. At the same time, the IAEA's reports on Iranian behaviour have become steadily more critical. In November, it published an unprecedented volume of intelligence pointing towards past Iranian work on developing a nuclear weapon, deeming it credible.
»However, some former IAEA officials are saying that the agency has gone too far. Robert Kelley, a former US weapons scientists who ran the IAEA action team on Iraq at the time of the US-led invasion, said there were worrying parallels between the west's mistakes over Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction then and the IAEA's assessment of Iran now. “Amano is falling into the Cheney trap. What we learned back in 2002 and 2003, when we were in the runup to the war, was that peer review was very important, and that the analysis should not be left to a small group of people,” Kelley said. “So what have we learned since then? Absolutely nothing. Just like [former US vice-president] Dick Cheney, Amano is relying on a very small group of people and those opinions are not being checked.”
»Other former officials have also raised concern that the current IAEA is becoming an echo chamber, focused on suspicions over Iran's programme, without the vigorous debate that characterised the era of Amano's predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei. They point to Amano's decision, in March last year, to dissolve the agency's office of external relations and policy co-ordination (Expo), which under ElBaradei had second-guessed some of the judgments made by the safeguards department inspectors. Expo cautioned against the publication of IAEA reports that the [Obama] administration might use to justify military action. Some inspectors believed that amounted to censorship and western governments said it was not the agency's job to make political judgments.
»ElBaradei's advisers from Expo were moved sideways in the organisation, and the department's functions have been absorbed by the director-general's office. “There has been a concentration of power, with less diversity of viewpoints,” a former agency official said, adding that Amano has surrounded himself with advisors who have the same approach to Iran.
»Hans Blix, a former IAEA director general, also raised concerns over the agency's credibility. "There is a distinction between information and evidence, and if you are a responsible agency you have to make sure that you ask questions and do not base conclusions on information that has not been verified," he said. "The agency has a certain credibility. It should guard it by being meticulous in checking the evidence. If certain governments want a blessing for the intelligence they provide the IAEA, they should provide convincing evidence. Otherwise, the agency should not give its stamp of approval." Blix said he could not say for certain whether that had happened under Amano's watch. […]
»Some of the controversy around Amano's management dates to his election in 2009, when he narrowly beat Abdul Minty, a South African diplomat who championed the interests of developing countries organised in the Non-Aligned Movement, in a campaign which became a geopolitical contest between North and South. “Amano's director-generalship began under a bad star,” said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The election was extremely polarised and bitter. Minty clearly appealed to states who see themselves as underdogs and have-nots. Amano was supported by the US and others who saw him as rolling back the IAEA's political aspirations under ElBaradei to a more technical agency.”
»The acrid taste left by the election was heightened by the US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks which revealed Amano's assiduous courting of American support. In an October 2009 cable, the US charge d'affaires, Geoffrey Pyatt, wrote: “Amano reminded [the] ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the developing countries group], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.”
»In an earlier cable in July that year, the Americans recount discussions with Amano on the future of officials, particular in Expo, "some of whom have not always been helpful to US positions". Last year, the named officials were moved to other jobs, out of the inner core which drafts the quarterly reports, like the controversial one on Iran in November.
»Hibbs argues that some degree of reorganisation was desirable and inevitable given the heated public battles under ElBaradei. “Many states' diplomats were appalled that a small number of officials in the two [IAEA] departments were at war with each other and at the extent they were prepared to use the media to get their points across," he said.
»Under Amano, internal debates have generally not leaked, and he has centralised the organisation, insisting that most public statements come from his office. But this has not stop controversy from enveloping the agency, just as it did under ElBaradei. In the first major crisis of the Amano tenure, the Fukushima nuclear disaster following the Japanese tsunami a year ago, he was widely blamed for not acting quickly and aggressively enough.
»Criticism over the agency's outspoken comments on Iran has also focused on the director-general. Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington-based non-proliferation organisation, said: “The main beneficiaries of the Amano reign have been US policy and the Japanese nuclear power industry. There has been no space between Amano and Barack Obama, and he withheld serious criticism of the industry during the Fukushima crisis.” He added: “On Iran, the difference is like night and day. ElBaradei constantly sought a diplomatic solution, while Amano wields a big stick and has hit Iran hard and repeatedly.”»
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