After three previous rounds of inconclusive voting back in March, the UN nuclear agency’s 35-nation board finally chose Yuikya Amano to replace Mohammad ElBaradei as IAEA head.  He will start in November 2009.

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Mr Amano won the required two-thirds majority from the IAEA governing board, defeating his South African rival, Abdul Samad Minty, by 23 votes to 11.

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Mr Amano had the support of many industrialised countries while Mr Minty was favoured by most developing nations.

The vote reflected that split, with Mr Amano scraping through to victory by the bare minimum margin, without the support of developing states. There was also one abstention.

Mr. Amano has held senior arms control posts in Tokyo and most recently was Japan’s representative at the IAEA.

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{The Rest of The Article}

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The jury is still out on what type of difference this election make on the agency, if any.  While some are very unenthusiastic about this change, the BBC (as quoted above) seems to consider Mr. Amano to be the West’s guy.

However, insofar that Japan just entered into a major oil deal with Iran, I’m not very optimistic that Mr. Amano is going to be the watchdog we are looking for.

Tags: IAEA, Japan, Mohammad ElBaradei, oil, Yukiya Amano

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 10:31 am and is filed under Iran, Nuclear Weapons, United Nations, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.