The Chinese head of a six-nation regional group with a rapidly rising profile suggested Tuesday he did not consider Iran a terrorist nation, AFP reported.
Zhang Deguang, secretary general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), made the remark nine days before a group summit in China where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is invited due to his nation's observer status.
"We can't agree to calling a state with SCO observer status a state supporter of terrorism," Zhang told reporters at a briefing in Beijing, introducing key topics at the Shanghai summit on June 15.
"If we have indisputable evidence that a country supports terrorism, we wouldn't agree to letting it be an observer," he said.
Zhang made the comment two days after US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld criticized China and Russia, the two largest members of the SCO, for seeking to draw Iran closer to the group.
"It strikes me as strange that one would want to bring into an organization that says it's against terrorism ... one of the leading terrorist nations in the world, Iran," Rumsfeld said in Singapore, according to AFP.
Zhang said on Tuesday he did not think that attendance by Iran's leader, yet to be confirmed, would hurt attempts to solve the standoff over the Islamic republic's nuclear program.
"I would say that I don't see any contradiction between the peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue and the participation of the Iranian leader at the summit in Shanghai," he said.
Apart from China and Russia, the SCO includes the four former Soviet Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Iran, Pakistan, India and Mongolia are observer nations and there has been increasing speculation that China and Russia may be looking to expand the organization to give it greater regional clout.
Officially formed only at the start of the decade, the SCO has gradually attracted more attention, with some observers seeing it as an embryonic Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Zhang denied the SCO intended to be any rival to NATO.
"The idea that a NATO of the east is entirely baseless, I think," Zhang told the briefing. "The SCO is not directed at any third party."
Chinese Head Of SCO: Iran Not A Terrorist State
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