Iran said on Thursday it is open to nuclear talks with the West but that technology was not up for discussion, amid rising hopes for a breakthrough in the stand-off over its controversial nuclear aims.
“We will negotiate about common concerns and for clearing up misunderstandings in the international atmosphere,” said hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“But we will never negotiate about what kind of technology we want to use,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech broadcast on state television.
The international package — which offers trade, diplomatic and technology incentives in return for a freeze of uranium enrichment — was drawn up by Britain, France and Germany and backed by the United States, Russia and China.
Iran faces robust United Nations Security Council action, including a range of possible sanctions, if it rejects the offer.
According to diplomatic sources in Vienna and Tehran, the offer would eventually allow Iran to enrich uranium on its territory, but only after the approval of the international community.
The US on Wednesday refused to confirm or deny those reports, dismissing them as “hypothetical and theoretical”. It reiterated that Iran must suspend all uranium enrichment on its soil as a condition for Washington’s participation in negotiations with the Islamic republic.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Thursday that Iran would cause “a lot of difficulty” if it refused to suspend uranium enrichment.
“I hope very much that they don’t reject it [that condition], because if they do, that will cause a lot of difficulty,” Blair said.
“They should know that all of us are seeking a diplomatic solution to this and whether we can get one depends to an extent on them.”
Iran insists its nuclear programme is designed purely to generate electricity, but the US and others are concerned Tehran is secretly seeking to build nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was set to issue a report on “the latest observations from inspectors who have just reported their latest information from [the Iranian enrichment facility in] Natanz”, spokesperson Melissa Fleming said.
Diplomats told Agence France-Presse that the IAEA may report that Iran has paused in the actual production of enriching uranium and is letting the centrifuge machines that do the work spin empty.
Such a pause, normal in the first stages of learning how to run cascades of centrifuges, may be seen as a step towards the suspension of enrichment, diplomats said.
The IAEA has called on Tehran, most recently in February, to suspend all uranium-enrichment activities. The last report, on April 28, made clear that Iran was not heeding the IAEA’s call to suspend uranium enrichment.
IAEA inspectors monitor Natanz, in central Iran, as part of routine safeguards under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who presented the proposal in Tehran on Tuesday, said the next day he was “more optimistic today [Thursday] than a month ago” — when Iran was ruling out any talk of halting sensitive nuclear work.
But while Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki vowed that the proposals would be “carefully” studied, some Iranian MPs were signalling their opposition to the offer.
“We can not suspend our peaceful nuclear activities,” the head of Parliament’s education committee, Ali Abbaspour, told student news agency ISNA on Thursday.
“We are ready to guarantee that our activity is peaceful. But we cannot accept that we deprive ourselves of scientific research,” he added.
An influential member of the national-security committee, Rashid Jalali Jafari, said Iran welcomes negotiations but reserves its national rights.
“We should accept negotiations, but on the condition that the Europeans do not sabotage our national interests,” he told the semi-official news agency Mehr.
Top national security official Ali Larijani has said the proposals contain “positive steps” but also “ambiguities” — signalling no immediate decision from Tehran was likely.
Diplomats say the US has helped sweeten the package by offering to lift certain sanctions if Tehran agrees to an enrichment freeze.
Washington has also agreed to join multilateral talks with Iran if it suspends, offering the prospect of the first substantive talks between the two arch-enemies for 26 years.
Diplomats said that if Iran suspends and negotiations go well, enrichment on Iranian soil could be possible — but that such a situation is years away.
“It leaves the door open to enrichment under certain caveats,” a European diplomat told AFP in Vienna, referring to what would almost certainly be a process of many years to verify that Iran’s nuclear programme is peaceful.
The package only calls on Iran to “suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities” in order to resume talks with European negotiators Britain, France and Germany, and perhaps the US and even Iranian allies Russia and China, the diplomat said. — AFP