SECTION 39: Abroad thoughts from home (2)

I must admit that when drawing up my list of international situations to worry about, the question of whether Iran has the capacity to make nuclear bombs isn't very high on it.

That position didn't change even after a week's exposure to the media in Britain, where hardly a day passed without some story about Iran and its supposed nuclear ambitions. I say ‘supposed', but despite all the Iranians have said - that they are entitled under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to develop peaceful nuclear capacity and have no intention of developing weapons - it is pretty much taken as read in the British and United States media that Iran's nuclear ambitions include nuclear weapons.

So there was a lot of hysteria when first the Iranians admitted that they had a uranium enrichment plant at Qom that they had not previously revealed to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its inspectors and second, conducted tests of missiles which, it was reported with breathless horror, were capable of reaching Israel. Not much is said about the fact that Iran is surrounded by the armies of the United States and its allies and might feel that it needs some insurance against any possible future return to the Bush doctrine (and barely veiled Israeli threats) on pre-emptive strikes. One rarely hears that Israel too has missiles and weapons capable of reaching Iran.

As for Israel's own nuclear weapons capacity, it's difficult to work out whether the silence over this (and how Iranians might feel about i ) is really only because having assessed its own national interest and concluded that accession to the NNPT would not fit, Israel declined to sign and so doesn't have to say anything about its nuclear capacity at all, far less admit the IAEA's poke-nosers. Yet another consideration is whether the strategy of keeping Mordechai Vanunu, the man convicted for revealing that Israel has ready-to-assemble nuclear bombs, in solitary confinement for the whole of his 18-year jail term and thereafter refusing him permission to travel outside Israel or speak to foreigners, has indeed caused global amnesia about Israel's nuclear secrets.

Frankly, when my thoughts turn to Iran, I'm more interested in its June 12th elections, in Iranian women, their place in Iran's political life, and the oppressive laws and codes about how they must dress to appear in public.

Iran's elections, which are said to have been conducted in such a manner as to make it appear that they have been taking lessons from our own Independent National Electoral Commission, caused at least as much public protest as our June 12th 1993 elections. Unfortunately for Iranians, their‘re-elected' President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, like President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, knows how to stir up the ‘international community' with outrageous comments so that he can claim to be the only true defender of his country's independence and integrity etc. against Western hostility, has proved to be rather more resilient in the face of even sustained protests than our ex-President Ibrahim Babangida. He, it will be recalled, responded to the anger of Nigerians who rose against his annulment of the June 12th elections by "stepping aside" shortly after blustering that the military were master practitioners in the art of violence.

Western hand-wringing and denunciation of the INEC-esque nature of the Iranian elections have been difficult to sustain when shambolic elections in Afghanistan, which so many North Atlantic Treaty Organisation soldiers' lives were sacrificed to guarantee, have proved where INEC's best students are.

Not to mention the fact that many other US friends and allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia, do not even pretend to be democracies, or have any intention of allowing women basic freedom to control their own lives.

It is altogether easier to rage at Ahmedinejad when he conveniently makes another Holocaust-denying statement, or questions the curious roundness of the ‘six million Jews' figure usually associated with the Nazi World War II genocide.

Israel of course, has a particular interest in interpreting his repeated assertions that the state should cease to exist as meaning that all Israelis should cease to exist, since it allows a much more alarmist position to be taken on Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza.

Still, when one does get home and re-immerses oneself in the noise and heat of Lagos, one finds that even without oppressive laws and dress codes, a Nigerian woman can be attacked, raped and killed for wearing the trousers that are the prescribed uniform for members of the National Youth Service Corps without any serious response from the police (e.g. arrests and prosecutions), and a very unserious one from the Director-General of the NYSC (that Youth Corpers "must learn to be security-conscious"). Grace Ushang met her terrible fate in Maiduguri even without the proposed law to prevent ‘indecent dressing' being championed by the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Women, whose silence on this appalling pointer to the sort of thing that Nigerian women can expect if the National Assembly is foolish enough to pass her evil bill, is deafening.

Honestly, sometimes it is comforting to turn one's thoughts abroad from home.