Tehran asks West to outline timetable: Offer on N-plan
VIENNA, Aug 24: Iran’s reply to an offer of incentives to halt nuclear work asks world powers to clarify key points including a timeline to implement the package, Iranian experts with diplomatic contacts said on Thursday.
The accounts of the three Iranians, two of whom have had good links to Tehran officialdom, appeared the first to detail some of the 100 or so questions Iran posed in a response it has touted as an opening to talks to end a standoff with the West.
The United States and Germany said Iran’s request for talks fell short of a UN Security Council demand that it stop enriching uranium by Aug 31 to qualify for the incentives, suggesting sanctions on Iran could loom after the deadline.
Western diplomats and Iran alike have withheld details of the 21-page response other than to say Tehran had ruled out suspending enrichment as a precondition for talks but offered to discuss doing so in the course of negotiations.
Abbas Maleki and Kaveh Afrasiabi, in a report distributed by the Agence Global news and opinion syndicate, said Iran’s questions focused on what it saw as vague elements of the offer, including the lack of a proposed timetable.
They said Iran wanted a brief reference in the offer to a possible Iranian role in a regional security arrangement — a critical concern for Tehran, given US hostility to its current leaders — to be fleshed out.
Iran also asked, they said, why the package mentioned its obligations to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but not to an NPT article pertaining to a country’s ‘inalienable right’ to acquire peaceful nuclear technology.
Further, Iran had requested firm guarantees on offered nuclear technology assistance, such as the sale of light-water reactors, as well as a nuclear fuel supply from abroad.
EASING OF US SANCTIONS: “Iran also seeks clarity on the status of (existing) US sanctions that prohibit offers of nuclear and technology assistance to Iran — is the US willing to lift some if not all of those sanctions?” Maleki and Afrasiabi said.
Although Iran had ruled out immediate suspension, its response left the door open for credible talks and ‘perhaps an acceptable resolution of the nuclear showdown for all parties’, Maleki and Afrasiabi wrote.
“By agreeing to put the issue of suspension on the table and commence talks immediately, Iran has sent a strong signal that the internal debate between power centres in Iran’s leadership has ended in favour of voices of moderation seeking a mutually satisfactory resolution of the nuclear standoff.”
Mr Maleki heads the International Institute for Caspian Studies in Tehran and is now a visiting researcher at Harvard University in the United States. Afrasiabi is the author of ‘Iran’s Nuclear Program: Debating Facts vs. Fiction’.
Trita Parsi, a US-based Iranian affairs specialist and author, said he was told by a senior Iranian diplomat that Tehran had offered assurances to suspend enrichment after negotiations on scope and duration.
He said Iran also offered a guarantee not to quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which prohibits diversions of peaceful atomic technology to military ends, and to ratify an NPT clause allowing short-notice UN inspections.—Reuters
