NEW YORK: Top US diplomat John Kerry was to meet his Iranian counterpart for a second time in two days, amid reports that tough talks on reining in Tehran’s nuclear programme have deadlocked.
“At this time as I speak, there is no significant progress,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said of the latest discussions.
Negotiators from the so-called P5+1 group — Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States plus Germany — began a new round of talks here last Friday only two months before a November 24 deadline to reach a deal. Seeking to make progress, the talks moved to a higher level when Kerry huddled in a New York hotel with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the EU’s chief negotiator Catherine Ashton.
But the trilateral discussion broke up with little news filtering out and US officials did not respond to inquiries about reports of a new offer on the table.
Yesterday’s “meeting will be a continuation of the discussions the three delegations held today on Iran’s nuclear program,” was all a State Department official said in a terse statement.
“We will be quickly meeting again. We regret that there has been no progress,” Fabius told reporters Friday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, adding that a ministerial level P5+1 meeting had been cancelled.
At the heart of the issue is a fundamental clash between the West’s desire to dismantle Iran’s capability to produce a nuclear bomb, and the Islamic republic’s insistence that it should retain the capacity to enrich uranium for a civilian energy programme.
The West wants Iran to dismantle virtually all but a few thousand of its 19,000 centrifuges which can be used to develop weapons-grade uranium.
But Iran bristles at destroying machines in which it has invested billions of dollars, and wants to retain many more of the centrifuges. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday he remained “cautiously optimistic.”
“We still have time,” he told reporters at UN headquarters in New York as the clock ticks down to November.
“We will do our utmost to make sure that remaining small, but extremely important, issues be resolved in a way that is acceptable to all,” Lavrov said.
A western diplomat said a lot of technical work had been done during the week on some of the core issues including enrichment and sanctions.
“When I say there are significant gaps, it means that we are still expecting significant moves from the Iranian side,” the diplomat said, adding the level of “mistrust is pretty high.”
Complicating the talks are domestic politics. Under a 2013 interim deal, Iran agreed to freeze parts of its nuclear programme and allow daily inspections of some nuclear sites in return for a partial release of billions of dollars from blocked oil revenues.
AFP
