TEHRAN, Iran, June 10, (Agencies): An Iranian negotiator warned Sunday that this month’s talks in Moscow over Iran’s nuclear program could stall because of faulty preparation.
Ali Bagheri, Iran’s No. 2 nuclear negotiator, said advance talks were agreed on to clarify the agenda for the Moscow round, set for June 18-19.
The official IRNA news agency said Bagheri made the complaint in a letter to senior EU official Helga Schmid on Sunday.
Concerned that Iran might be aiming toward nuclear weapons, the West wants to stop Iran’s 20 percent uranium enrichment program. Western experts say it would not be difficult to upgrade 20 percent enriched uranium to weapons grade. Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful.
In exchange for discussing enrichment, Iran wants the West to ease sanctions.
Schmid has indicated there is no need for preliminary talks. The EU official said the six-power proposal at the Baghdad talks addresses “our key concerns on the 20 percent enrichment activities.”
“The next round of talks in Moscow will be successful provided that deputies and experts are able to prepare a specific agenda on the basis of Iran’s proposals and those of 5+1,” IRNA quoted Bagheri’s letter as saying, referring to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.
“If agreements at each round of talks are not pursued by deputies and experts in an appropriate manner, what will be the guarantee for success of the upcoming talks,” IRNA quoted Bagheri as saying.
“The only path” for world powers holding talks with Iran on its nuclear activities is to accept Tehran’s position, a top military representative for the country’s supreme leader said on Sunday, according to the Mehr news agency.
“Unfortunately, the P5+1 logic, especially that of America, is of bullying, which is in no way acceptable to our people and officials,” said Ali Saeedi, a senior figure in Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards who acts as agent for supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The comments hardened a tone of defiance coming from Tehran ahead of a new round of fraught talks to take place in Moscow on June 18-19 between Iran and the so-called P5+1 group (the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China).
They also added to a sense of pessimism growing over a separate track of dialogue between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran about inspections following a fruitless meeting last Friday in Vienna.
Saeedi accused the West of “pursuing its own aims that go beyond the (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) regulations and the agency, and which do not fall within the IAEA’s remit.”
Logical
He portrayed Iran’s position in both tracks as “logical and rational” and sternly told the United States and its Western allies to adopt it.
“The only path in front of them is to accept Iran’s demands in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and to stop politicising it (the nuclear issue),” Mehr quoted him as saying.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has accepted the IAEA’s regulations and it is in the interest of the West to adhere to the agency’s regulations,” he said.
Other Iranian officials have underlined that Tehran is not budging from its view that the West should ease its punishing economic embargoes and accept Iran has a “right” to uranium enrichment as first steps in the negotiations.
That insistence contrasts with the P5+1 group’s equally stubborn bid to coax Iran into giving up its higher-level uranium enrichment and stocks in exchange for more modest incentives, such as airplane spare parts and the lifting of an EU ban on insurance for oil tanker shipments to Asia.
The gulf between those two positions almost caused the collapse of the last round of Iran/P5+1 talks, in Baghdad last month. Both sides, though, agreed to hold the next round in Moscow — just two weeks before a total EU embargo on Iranian oil imports comes into effect.
Iran’s defence minister, Ahmad Vahidi, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as echoing the line that it was up to the West, not Iran, to bend in the negotiations.
“The Western nations should comply with Iran’s rational demand for the use of peaceful nuclear energy,” he said, adding that Iran “will not give up its rights.”
Iran rejects Western and IAEA suspicions that it is pursuing the development of a nuclear weapons capability.
Vahidi and other officials have highlighted Khamenei’s repeated stated opposition to possessing atomic weapons.