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Ahmadinejad says the age of empires has ended

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 YEKATERINBURG: Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday said the age of empires had ended and the capitalist system has started to crumble."The international capitalist order is retreating," the controversial president told world leaders, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and China's Hu Jintao, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg."It is absolutely obvious that the age of empires has ended and its revival will not take place."A broadly-smiling Ahmadinejad, wearing a dark suit and as usual no tie, earlier shook hands with a beaming Medvedev before the leaders went into the second day of the summit.Whether Ahmadinejad -- who has a habit of stealing the limelight at such events -- would turn up had become a source of intrigue after he postponed his planned arrival on Monday following unrest in Iran. Ahmadinejad later held a bilateral meeting with Medvedev, the Kremlin said."Iraq is still occupied. There is no order in Afghanistan. The Palestinian problem is unsolved," he said."America is overwhelmed by economic and political crises and there is no hope in their decisions.”"The allies of the United States are also not in a position to wrestle with these problems."Pointing to the economic crisis, Ahmadinejad said that "drastic changes are an unavoidable necessity in the wake of damage caused by international capitalism"Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov earlier described the elections as an "internal affair of the Iranian people", in Moscow's first official reaction to the controversy.The Iranian president was attending the summit in Iran's capacity as an observer to the organisation and Tehran has in the past expressed interest in becoming a fully-fledged member.The visit to Russia was Ahmadinejad's first foreign trip since his landslide re-election victory over his moderate rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.

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