Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The question marks hanging over Iran’s nuclear activities, peaceful or warlike or possibly both, are bringing together in Geneva today 1 October top officials from Iran and the group known as 5+1: Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany. It follows an earlier meeting of the group in July 2008, which ended on a sour note, and where the head of the US delegation, William Burns, reportedly left the room to avoid shaking hands with his Iranian counterpart, Saeed Jalili. Early in 2009 US President Barack Obama’s administration said it intended to take a fresh approach, and Obama has since said that he wants to allow time to reassess the US relationship with Iran.
This session is described by Iran as an opportunity to discuss security in the region, and by some of the others as a chance for Iran to clarify its nuclear activities. It is also being seen in the West as a chance for China and Russia, whose attitudes towards Iran may have shifted in the past year, to provide their reaction to the announcement that Iran has a uranium enrichment plant at Qom.
China is the only country to send relatively low level official to the talks (Ed. note: A major celebration, with top officials present, is taking place in China today for the 60th anniversary of Communist China).
Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, has said that his country will not discuss its nuclear programme at the Geneva meeting. But at a press briefing Wednesday night in Geneva a senior US official said “it’s important to remember that the 5+1 group was formed to focus on the nuclear issue, and that remains our focus and our paramount concern. We’ve all acknowledged Iran’s right to pursue a peaceful nuclear program but we’ve each also emphasized that with that right comes a responsibility to demonstrate ‘convincingly’, as President Medvedev put it last week, the exclusively peaceful purposes of Iran’s programme.”
Tensions have been higher than usual over Iran’s nuclear intentions in the past week, since Western leaders accused Iran of hiding the plant at Qom. Iran then announced the plant’s existence to the United Nations, as required, but Mohamed ElBaradei, outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Wednesday that Iran was “outside the law” for not reporting the plant before it was built, as required.
It is the first meeting at which a US official, negotiator Burns, is considered to be a “full participant” and it comes a day after Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran’s foreign minister, paid a rare visit to the Iranian office in Pakistan’s Embassy in Washington. Mottaki is scheduled to give a press conference at the UN in New York Thursday.
US officials there played down the visit, saying they have no information about the significance of it. Pakistan represents Iran’s interests with the US. Switzerland represents US interests with Iran. Earlier this week Swiss Ambassador Livia Leu Agosti visited three US citizens detained by Iran for crossing the border illegally. The visit took place at the Iran Foreign Affairs office, according to official news agency Fars, which builds on remarks made by “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [who] this month suggested in an interview with the American television network NBC that the Americans’ release might be linked to the release of Iranian diplomats who were held by the US troops in Iraq.” The Iranians were held for 30 months.
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AP (Detroit Free Press)
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News story, GenevaLunch, 1 October 2009.
Filed under: Politics
Tags: 6+1 talks, energy, Geneva, Iran, Manouchehr Mottaki, Mohamed ElBaradei, negotiations, nuclear, Qom, Saeed Jalili, U.S., UN nuclear, weapons, William Burns
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