How Iran Covered the NAM Summit
In an overview of Iranian media coverage of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi describes subtle digs at the government, the portrayal of Mohammed Morsi’s criticisms of Syria and the official depictions of the Egyptian president’s NAM speech.
The reformist daily newspaper Etemaad covered in some detail the story of how Mohammed Morsi’s criticisms of Syria have been marginalized in official depictions of the Egyptian president’s NAM speech. Etemaad, in stark contrast to other domestic media, also reported the Syrian prime minister’s walking out of the conference hall in protest of Morsi’s criticism of the Assad regime.
The Iranian organizers of NAM tried their utmost to frame Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech as the centerpiece of the summit, and the country’s political as well as military ruling elite were in attendance. Prominent reformist politicians were noticeably absent.
In his speech (in Farsi), which took pride of place on the pages of the domestic media and across the entirety of the political spectrum, Khamenei proclaimed that “the control room of the world should not be managed by the dictatorial will of a few Western countries." Like all the other Iranian politicians who spoke at NAM, he emphasized the need for a fundamental restructuring of the UN Security Council.
Recently back from Damascus, Alaoddin Boroujerdi, head of the Majles’ National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, told Fars News of the enthusiastic reception of Khamenei’s speech: “In every international summit the Leader is present, out of respect the whole of the audience rises to its feet. This is indicative of his spiritual place in the world."
