VIENNA: Iran increased its foot-dragging on United Nations atomic inspections in the run-up to getting hit by UN sanctions against its nuclear programme, and these problems are now expected to escalate, diplomats said.
At stake is the ability of the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency to determine whether Iran’s nuclear programme is a peaceful effort to generate electricity, as Tehran claims, or as Washington says a cover for the secret development of nuclear weapons.
The IAEA is still unable to make a determination, almost four years into an investigation that began in February 2003 after an Iranian resistance group revealed that Tehran was hiding sensitive atomic work.
The United Nations Security Council resolution which was adopted on Saturday requests a report from IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei within 60 days on whether Iran has suspended uranium enrichment, which makes nuclear reactor fuel but also atom bomb material, and cooperated fully with the IAEA’s investigation.
But the Iranian parliament on Sunday agreed to urgently vote on a bill that would oblige the government to “revise” its cooperation by limiting inspections with the IAEA, in retaliation for sanctions levied Saturday by the Security Council.
This cooperation has in any case flagged since 2003. ElBaradei said in November that the IAEA’s investigation was still hampered by unanswered questions about work hidden by Tehran for almost two decades.
Iran in February stopped allowing special inspections under an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in retaliation for the IAEA’s setting the stage for Tehran to be referred to the Security Council.
Iran has since then limited the IAEA to inspections under a “safeguards agreement” that allows UN inspectors only to monitor sites where there is declared nuclear material.
The wider inspections had allowed the IAEA to search sites where there was suspicion of nuclear-related activities even if none had been declared.
The IAEA considers these “additional protocol” inspections, as well as so-called “transparency” visits at more ambiguous sites, as essential for full verification of a nation’s atomic work.
But in recent months Iran and the IAEA have been involved in a tug-of-war over even safeguards inspections, with Tehran trying to limit monitoring at Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in Natanz to only once a month, diplomats said.
Natanz is the heart of Iran’s disputed nuclear programme, as Tehran has rejected the UN call to stop enrichment.
Enrichment work has so far been low-scale, involving only a few hundred of the centrifuge machines that enrich uranium.
But Iran was on Sunday to start putting in place 3,000 centrifuges in defiance of the UN sanctions.
Meanwhile, Iranian ambassador to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh said that an agreement for the IAEA to monitor Natanz only once-a-month had in fact been reached, even if Iran were not applying this strictly.
Diplomats close to the IAEA insisted however that they were able to carry out their visits to safeguarded nuclear sites as necessary, and pointed out that Natanz, in central Iran, was visited twice in December and that there are cameras there full-time.Iran has also honoured a promise made at a meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors in November.—AFP
