Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday said that any new deal offered by European powers to halt Iran’s civilian nuclear activities will be rejected, state news agency Irna reported.
”Any offer which requires us to halt our peaceful nuclear activities will be invalid,” Ahmadinejad said after returning from a five-day visit to Indonesia.
”I am surprised that a group of people hold meetings without us being present there and make decisions for us,” he added, referring to Western diplomats’ meetings over the nuclear stand-off with Tehran.
European Union powers Britain, France and Germany are again considering offering a bundle of wide-ranging benefits to Iran in return for a guarantee that it will suspend its uranium-enrichment activities, which the West suspects of being part of a covert atomic-weapons programme.
Its foreign ministers meet along with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana on the issue on Monday.
Ahmadinejad rejected moves by the West to impose any conditions on Tehran. ”These masters believe that they are still living in the colonial era and so their decisions are not valid for us,” he said.
”When we are not present [in the discussions] any decisions [made there] become meaningless,” he added.
The hard-line leader said the ”best incentives” for cooperation from Tehran would be the implementation of parts of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which recognise the right of signatory states to do research on and produce nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
For Iran, the right to nuclear technology means first and foremost its right to uranium enrichment, a highly sensitive process that can be used both for making nuclear fuel and in a weapons programme.
The so-called EU-3 is currently preparing a new package of trade, security and technological incentives to try to entice Tehran away from uranium enrichment and resolve the nuclear crisis peacefully.
Their efforts since 2003 to win guarantees that Iran’s nuclear programme is peaceful in nature have foundered, with Iran defiantly pushing ahead since April on enriching uranium. — AFP
