EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the start of two-days of closed-door nuclear talks at the United Nations office in Geneva, yesterday.
Geneva: The Iranian delegation to international talks in Geneva has presented new proposals which it claims will end the longstanding deadlock over its nuclear programme.
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, gave an hour-long PowerPoint presentation of the proposals, entitled “Closing an unnecessary crisis: Opening new horizons”, to senior diplomats from the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China at the Palace of Nations in Geneva.
The presentation was not made public, but it is believed to lay out a timetable for a confidence-building deal that would exchange limits on Iran’s nuclear programme in return for relief from sanctions and international recognition of the country’s right to enrich uranium.
The PowerPoint talk marked the opening gambit in the first round of negotiations between the new Iranian government of President Hassan Rowhani and the six-nation negotiating group chaired by the EU foreign policy chief, Lady Ashton. All sides have described the talks as the most constructive for years.
Unlike previous negotiations, the two days of talks in Geneva are being carried out in English, as Zarif and his deputy, Abbas Araqchi, are fluent, so they moved at least twice the speed, without the need for interpreters.
Speaking to reporters after the presentation, Araqchi said: “We believe our proposal has the capacity to make a breakthrough.”
He said the Iranian plan set out a timeline of six months to get to a deal and that Iran hoped the next step, a new round of talks on the details of a deal, would take place within a month.
Ashton’s spokesman, Michael Mann, said: “We heard a presentation this morning from foreign minister Zarif. It was very useful. Talks are reconvening this afternoon to look at further details.”
However, immediately after the morning session of talks, Zarif went straight to his hotel because of a backache, telling reporters he was in too much pain to talk. He has claimed the condition was brought on by attacks by the conservative press in Tehran, which he said had misquoted him as saying the recent thaw with the US was a mistake.
The continuing twinges forced Zarif to lie down for much of the flight from Tehran to Geneva, on which he brought a doctor to help keep the pain under control. The backache was apparently not the only reminder of the pressures back home. According to one Iranian report, Zarif’s delegation received a phone call from Tehran this morning with last-minute changes to the Iranian proposal.
Asked about the foreign minister’s condition, Araqchi said: “He’s not alright at all. He is suffering a lot.” He said Zarif had gone back to the hotel but would not leave Geneva. Speaking before the talks began, a senior US official said the aim was to progress towards an interim confidence-building deal that would defuse tensions and buy time for a more comprehensive solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff. The official said that Araqchi’s announcement days before Geneva that Iran would not contemplate shipping out enriched uranium as part of a deal was not a critical problem. “There’s a variety of ways of dealing with that,” she said.
“To get to a comprehensive agreement is very, very difficult with highly technical issues that have to be resolved. We are looking for a confidence-building step that will put some time on the clock,” the official said. “The aim is to rebuild trust ... to constrain the programme and even take it back a notch.”
She pointed out that the US delegation included financial experts as evidence that Washington was ready to talk about scaling down sanctions in response to Iranian concessions. “If they are ready to go, we are ready to go,” she said.
Meanwhile, Israel urged the world to avoid a partial deal with Iran which could see a relaxing of sanctions. The security cabinet warned the international community against any “partial agreement that would fail to bring about the full dismantling of the Iranian military nuclear programme...(which) could lead to the collapse of the sanctions regime.”
Iran began two days of closed-door negotiations in Geneva on Tuesday with the P5+1 countries — the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany, ending a six-month hiatus. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a media blitz in recent days, warning against concessions to Iranian President Hassan Rowhani.
Rowhani’s conciliatory tone has raised hopes of a breakthrough in the decade-long dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
The security cabinet statement called on world powers to be wary of Iran during negotiations.
“Iran believes it can get by with cosmetic concessions that would not significantly impede its path to developing nuclear weapons, concessions that could be reversed in weeks,” the statement said. “In exchange, Iran demands an easing of the sanctions, which have taken years to put in place.”
The security cabinet said the P5+1 should “reject Iran’s attempts to reach a deal that would leave it with the capability to develop nuclear weapons.”
An Israeli official told AFP that the seven-member ministerial committee had met on Monday night but released the statement Tuesday morning to coincide with the launch of the Geneva talks.
Israel, it said, did not oppose Iran having a peaceful nuclear energy programme -- one which would not require uranium enrichment or plutonium production, it said. “Iran claims that it supposedly has the ‘right to enrich.’ But a country that regularly deceives the international community, that violates UN Security Council resolutions ... has no such right,” it said.
The Guardian/AFP
