Assembly of SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) is set to begin this spring now that a building for it is nearly ready in Allaan, Jordan. But progress on the light source was overshadowed recently when a group of scientists from Iran was not granted visas to attend a users meeting in Egypt.
SESAME formed around a gift from Germany: BESSY I, a decommissioned light source, will provide the 0.8-GeV booster synchrotron injector system (see Physics Today, August 2002, page 27). SESAME is supposed to open for science in 2010. It will be a 2.5-GeV machine and is designed for a stored current of 400 mA, although if funding is tight, it may start off with a lower current.
In December the International Atomic Energy Agency committed $750 000 over four years mainly for training scientists to use SESAME. And last October, the European Union said it will give the project €1 million ($1.3 million). This money may help persuade the US and Japan to support SESAME, says the project’s council president, Herwig Schopper of CERN.
Not counting Germany’s gift of the old synchrotron, or the building and site, which Jordan provided, “the cost to realize the machine—not including the beamlines—is about €15 million,” Schopper says. The annual budget, which is paid by member countries, will increase from about $1 million now to $4.5 million when the machine starts up, he adds.
Last summer, Cyprus became the eighth member of SESAME—making it a rare project on which Cyprus and Turkey are collaborators. The other members are Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Authority. Iran has been involved since the outset and is expected to become a full member.
But in November, 35 Iranian scientists did not receive their visas to attend a users meeting in Alexandria, Egypt. The ensuing brouhaha underscores the importance of SESAME’s dual mission to facilitate both science and friendship in the Middle East.
Undisputed is that the Iranians had applied and been accepted to the meeting and they had reserved and in some cases paid for their flights to Egypt; the Egyptian organizers had booked and paid for hotel rooms for the Iranians; and Egypt did not issue visas to the Iranian contingent.
According to Hany Helal, Egypt’s minister for higher education and scientific research, the lack of visas was the result of a misunderstanding and “there is no political issue behind it.” The Iranians, he says, should have applied for their visas two or three months before the meeting. Had he known in time, Helal adds, “I could have helped push it [the visas] through.”
But Sharif University of Technology’s Reza Mansouri, one of Iran’s two nonvoting representatives on the SESAME council, insists it was not a misunderstanding. “The office of Egyptian interests [in Tehran] said 30 to 40 days was what was needed. We applied 40 days in advance,” he says.
Upset at Egypt for not issuing the visas and at the SESAME council for seeming to downplay the matter, Mansouri boycotted a SESAME council meeting in Jordan in December. Javad Rahighi, who heads the neutron physics group at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, attended the meeting as chair of the SESAME training committee but not in his role as a council representative. He adds, “This is not an issue we can leave under the carpet. We should make sure it will never happen again.” The timing is especially sensitive, Rahighi says, because the Iranian parliament is preparing to vote on officially joining SESAME. “This issue puts a shadow over the whole thing. It would help if an Egyptian authority would come up with a clear explanation and an apology.”
Schopper, for his part, says it’s better for SESAME not to exaggerate this issue. “There are visa problems everywhere,” he says. At its December meeting in Jordan, he adds, the council passed a resolution requiring that the organizers of future SESAME meetings provide information on obtaining visas for attending. SESAME’s host country of Jordan, he notes, “is guaranteeing that everyone can enter.”
