World powers struggled on Wednesday to show a united front over Iran’s nuclear drive, fearing Tehran will exploit any split to forge ahead with uranium enrichment.
”I would have thought that this is the time for the world to send a clear and united message to the Iranian regime,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in London as diplomats gathered in Moscow.
Tehran must receive a clear message to stop uranium enrichment and ”desist from financing terrorist activities around the world and get back to their international obligations”, Blair told Parliament.
”Nobody is talking about military invasion of Iran or military action against Iran,” he added.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy warned, too, that the world powers must be together if they were to dissuade Iran. ”If the international community is united — China and Russia with us — the Iranians … will answer: ‘We cannot be isolated’,” Douste-Blazy told French radio RMC.
”If, on the contrary, the Chinese and the Russians, if the international community is not united, it makes it easy for the Iranians to continue” to defy international demands to halt the programme, he said.
French President Jacques Chirac, who departed on Friday for a visit to Egypt, said the possibility that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons was ”unacceptable”.
Meanwhile, senior diplomats from the Group of Eight powers gathered for Moscow talks, ostensibly preparing for a July summit but clearly overshadowed by the Iran stand-off.
The Moscow meeting of G8 political directors would be ”another opportunity in a different forum to talk about what are the diplomatic means to increase pressure on the Iranian regime”, a United States State Department spokesperson said in Washington on Tuesday.
Iran sent a high-ranking delegation to Moscow to hold discussions with European diplomats ”aimed at finding a solution” to the crisis, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told state radio in Tehran.
But the foreign ministry gave no indication of whether the envoys were bearing any concessions from the hard-line leadership, with just over a week to go before the expiry of a United Nations Security Council deadline to freeze uranium enrichment.
The UN Security Council is awaiting a report, due by April 28 from Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, on whether Iran has complied with demands to freeze uranium enrichment.
Iran insists its programme is peaceful, but enrichment can be extended from making reactor fuel to the production of warheads.
On Tuesday, a meeting of senior officials from the permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — along with Germany met in Moscow but failed to agree on concrete action over Iran.
”There was no decision and no concluding document, but we were not aiming for that,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said of the talks.
The Russian foreign ministry said in a statement that the parties to the talks had agreed that the Iranian programme was a ”worry”.
”The government of Iran has so far failed to take the steps required of Iran” that were spelled out in resolutions of the UN nuclear watchdog agency on February 4 and the UN Security Council on March 29, it said.
Russia and China have shown extreme reluctance to threaten the use of force or even sanctions against Iran.
US President George Bush, in contrast, warned on Tuesday that ”all options are on the table” in dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme, which Washington fears is a covert grab for the atomic bomb. Bush said the US preferred a diplomatic resolution.
Visiting Riyadh, however, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw refused even to discuss the threat of military action. ”I am not going to discuss hypotheses which I do not believe are going to arise,” he said.
The top US representative at the meetings in Moscow over the past two days, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, said that participants discussed the possibility of moving towards UN sanctions on Iran but reached no agreement.
”You know, the Iranians are not 10 feet tall,” Burns told the US television network CBS on Tuesday.
”And they have dug quite a hole for themselves, and they’re isolated. And so our tactic is to keep pressure on them and see if we can get them to back down,” he said.
The row and Iran’s defiant stand have helped drive oil prices to all-time highs and gold values to within sight of a 25-year high.
On Wednesday, New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in May, dropped 35c to $71 per barrel in electronic dealing, after notching up a record close of $71,35 on Tuesday. — AFP
