By Steve Hynd
The BBC reports that the next director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, will be Japan's Yukiya Amano.
Mr Amano won the required two-thirds majority from the IAEA governing board, defeating his South African rival, Abdul Samad Minty, by 23 to 11 votes. The present head, Mohamed ElBaradei, is scheduled to end his term in November.
It's a victory for Western nations over the developing world, probably ensuring that in future there will be less of the kind of criticism of Western nuclear hypocrisy we've seen from el-Baradei.
Mr. Amano is generally endorsed by Western nations, while Mr. Minty has backing from developing countries -- a split that led to the deadlock in March.
...The split vote reflects the deep divide between Western nations, including the U.S., and developing countries that accuse the West of being indifferent to the problems of poorer countries. The two sides have also faced off over the issue of Iran's refusal to freeze uranium enrichment. Representatives of some developing nations have privately said they share Western fears that Iran may seek to use enrichment to develop weapons. But as a bloc, they tend to support Iran's argument that it has a right to an enrichment program for generating energy.
But whatever happened to the Bushies' fave candidate, DDG Olli Heinonen? He was happily prepared to set up briefings of dubious US-provided intel just so that the Bush administration could leak it to the press as "coming from the IAEA". Did that torpedo him with other members? Did the Obama admin. withdraw U.S. backing for him? He just faded from contention some months back with no media coverage. Someone must know the backstory there.
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