AFP, Berlin, Feb 25, 2010  – The head of Germany’s exporters’ federation BGA called Thursday for harsher measures against Iran over its disputed nuclear policy, saying the time for appeasement had passed.
’From Chamberlain I’ve turned into Churchill,’ Anton Boerner told the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper, a reference to former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who sought to appease Adolf Hitler and to Britain’s subsequent war-time leader.
Pursuing the current ’policy of appeasement’ towards Iran will achieve nothing, the BGA chief said.
German business has long opposed sanctions against Tehran because of its strong trading links with Iran.
But Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that Germany, along with other western nations, will toughen sanctions already in place to force Iran to give up its nuclear programme which they fear will soon result in an atomic bomb.
Tehran claims its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.
Asked why he now favoured stronger measures, Boerner said Europeans have bent over backwards to try to convince Iran to cooperate.
But ’when a state lies all the time to everyone, there comes a point of no return,’ he added.
Further sanctions, he conceded, would be ’mainly symbolic’ as even stronger measures now under consideration by Europe and the United States ’will not stop goods reaching Iran.’
Germany’s two largest insurance companies, Allianz and Munich Re, recently announced they would stop doing business in Iran, while the giant industrial Siemens group said last month that it too was pulling out of Iran.
Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and the world’s second-largest exporter after China, recently cut credit export guarantees to Iran.