President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, current chair of the Non-Aligned Movement, travels next week to Azerbaijan and Kuwait to attend forums on boosting co-operation in Asia, the state-run IRNA news agency reported on Saturday. He will attend a summit of the Economic Co-operation Organisation in Baku on Tuesday and outline Iran's positions on co-operation with member countries, said the head of his international affairs office, Mohammad Reza Forghani.
The organisation groups Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. On Wednesday, Ahmadinejad will head to the oil-rich Gulf state of Kuwait to attend the first summit of the Asia Co-operation Dialogue - a 31-strong forum set up in 2002 to promote co-operation and dialogue. Members include Asian countries, as well as Russia, Iran and the six-nation Gulf Co-operation Council of which Kuwait is part.
Ahmadinejad is due to deliver a speech at the summit "to propose means of reinforcing co-operation among Asian nations," IRNA quoted Forghani as saying. In September, Iran hosted a summit of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, scoring a point against Western efforts to isolate it over its controversial nuclear activities.
But Iran has uneasy relations with both Azerbaijan and Kuwait. Tensions between Iran and mainly Muslim but officially secular Azerbaijan have risen over the past year, with a series of arrests in Baku of attack plot suspects with alleged links to Tehran. On Tuesday, Azerbaijan jailed 22 alleged Islamic radicals - all Azerbaijani citizens - for plotting attacks on the US and Israeli embassies in the ex-Soviet state in collaboration with Iran. In May, Kuwait sentenced to life in prison two Iranians, a Kuwaiti and a stateless man to life for spying for Iran, triggering a condemnation from Tehran which demanded they be released.
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