Gates to lead US team in Manama

Manama: US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates will lead the US delegation to the Manama Dialogue in December in a clear indication of the importance the US is attaching to the annual security conference.

However, the French, who have repeatedly said that Europe should play a bigger role in the region, will also enhance their participation and will most likely send their foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, diplomats told Gulf News.

Official request

Iran, often presented as the arch nemesis of the US in the region, said that it would take part in the three-day conference on December 11-13, but wanted an official invitation from the Bahraini foreign ministry.

The request, according to diplomats, will be easily satisfied with Bahrain being an ardent supporter of stability and dialogue in the troubled region.

"However, we have to wait to see if the Iranians will really come. In 2007, they said that they would come, but cancelled their participation at the last moment, with the conference hours from its start," the sources said.

The Iranians later attributed their absence to the busy schedule of the head of their delegation, foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, but diplomats told Gulf News that they were upset over the refusal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), the organisers of the Manama Dialogue, to extend an invitation to the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS).

The institute had organised a conference of Holocaust deniers recently in Tehran, attended by participants from 30 countries, including several from Europe, and Jews from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect who argued that the Holocaust was either fabricated or exaggerated.