Egypt's Maher: Camp David Issue "in the Past"
January 05, 2004
AFP
IranMania
TEHRAN -- Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher has asserted that his country's Camp David peace accord with Israel was "is merely a thing of the past" and Cairo and Tehran should boost their ties, the official Iranian news agency reported Monday.
"I don't think using the issue of Camp David will be useful, because it does not exist anymore and is merely a thing of the past," Maher said of the 1979 peace deal -- one of the reasons why Iran broke off ties with Egypt.
"There have been many changes and I believe that this issue between Iran and Egypt has already been closed. What exists now is the interest of Iran and Egypt to work with each other," he said in an interview with IRNA.
The two countries severed diplomatic ties in 1980, a year after Cairo gave asylum to the deposed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and signed peace with Israel.
Relations were particularly bad while Egypt supported Iraq during its 1980-1988 war with Iran. However, trade and other ties have been improving since the 1990s.
And in a major step forward, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Iranian President Mohammad Khatami met last month on the sidelines of a UN technology summit in Geneva.
Mubarak has also been invited to Iran in February to attend the D-8 economic summit of developing nations, and a confidant to the Egyptian president said Mubarak would visit Tehran and normalise ties if Iran scraps public tributes to his predecessor Anwar Sadat's assassin.
A street in Tehran is named after Sadat's assassin, Khaled Eslamboli, branded as a "martyr" with a big mural of him on the towering building. Mubarak has also taken issue with Iran's alleged support of Egyptian Islamist militants.
Maher termed the talks between Khatami and Mubarak "very important", adding "Iran and Egypt are now preparing the ground to cement their relations, and these efforts must continue."
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Reza Pahlavi, son of the late shah of Iran, said Sunday that any US diplomatic overtures to Iran should not seek to appease "the clerical regime" ruling the country.
Pahlavi said he would like to see an open referendum occur in Iran "so that the people of Iran can democratically decide for themselves what they want."