VIENNA, May 8: Iran accepted an agenda compromise on Tuesday in the waning days of a UN non-proliferation conference that saved the meeting from collapse and opened the door to talks on compliance with nuclear rules.

The two-week conference had been deadlocked since opening on April 30 as Iran, which the United States charges is secretly developing the atomic bomb and which is under UN sanctions for its nuclear work, objected to an agenda item that called for full compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Iran wanted to amend this to read compliance with “all the provisions” of the treaty to ensure that disarmament by nuclear-weapons states would be discussed, as well as compliance by non-weapons states with NPT safeguards against using atomic energy for military purposes.

Iran finally accepted an explanatory footnote to that effect, rather than re-working the basic text, which Japanese conference chair Yukiya Amano had refused to do.

Iranian ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told the conference his government was accepting this compromise “in a display of good will and flexibility.” US delegation chief Christopher Ford told reporters it was a “disappointment that as a result of Iran's obstruction of the proceedings that it's taken so long to get to the point of beginning substantive discussion.” He said he was “pleased ... that in the face of pressure from a united international community, Iran has backed down in return for a restatement of what has been obvious all along.” At an afternoon session, Ford said that besides disarmament, key topics before the conference ends on Friday would be “regional issues, including the 1995 (NPT conference) Resolution on the Middle East (creating a nuclear-free zone), how to expand peaceful international nuclear cooperation, and how best to deter violators of the Treaty from withdrawing from it,” as well as compliance with safeguards.

A crucial subject here is how to penalise states, like North Korea, which pull out of the NPT after using aid for a peaceful nuclear program to develop atomic weapons.

But South African ambassador

Abdul Samad Minty turned the focus back to nuclear weapons states when he said Britain's effort to update its Trident submarine deterrent was a step back from the need to “diminish the role of nuclear weapons in security policies.” The conference of 130 states from the 189-nation NPT is the first of a series preparing for a 2010 review on amendments to the 1970 treaty on fighting the spread of nuclear weapons. Many feel the NPT needs to be reinforced in order to handle nuclear crises such as Iran and North Korea.

Soltanieh's compromise offering, based on a proposal made by South Africa, was immediately backed by non-aligned states South Africa, Algeria, Cuba, Indonesia, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Syria, before being adopted by consensus.

Several Western diplomats had charged that Iran was blocking the meeting in order to avoid further condemnation over its defiance of UN sanctions calling on it to stop enriching uranium and to cooperate fully with UN inspectors.

London-based disarmament analyst Rebecca Johnson said she thought non-aligned movement (NAM) states “had made it clear to the Iranians that ... a solution had to be found because for the most of the NAM... the NPT is very important.” In addition, “they did not want Iran to walk away from the treaty,” she said.—AFP