MOSCOW/TEHRAN, 14 September 2003 — Russia threw its support yesterday behind a tough International Atomic Energy Agency resolution on Iran, urging Tehran to cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog. Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak as saying Iran should not see the IAEA’s Oct. 31 deadline for Tehran to prove it had no secret atomic weapons program as an ultimatum.
“It is a serious and respectful appeal by the agency for Iran to cooperate with IAEA with a view to lifting all remaining questions that the agency has regarding Iran’s peaceful nuclear programs, and do so without delay,” Kislyak said.
Russia is building Iran’s first nuclear power reactor at the port of Bushehr. It has come under intense pressure from the United States, suspicious of Tehran’s policies, to drop the project but has refused to do so unless the IAEA presents evidence Iran is secretly developing banned weapons. “It is in Iran’s interests to clear these issues and thus confirm the peaceful nature of its nuclear programs,” Kislyak said.
The IAEA adopted the resolution without a vote at its Vienna headquarters on Friday, sparking an angry walkout from the Iranian ambassador, who blasted the agency for descending into “political dialogue.” The decision followed five days of closed-door talks, during which Washington had furiously lobbied for the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors to accept the text.
Iran yesterday angrily hit back at the IAEA for imposing the deadline, dismissing the resolution as “political”. Amid warnings that future cooperation with the IAEA could be in doubt, Tehran’s ambassador to the body, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the official news agency IRNA that “Iran cannot take part in a political process”.
“The Western group in the (IAEA) board of governors, in line with their political goals, has made illegitimate, illegal and impractical requests from Iran,” Salehi complained, labeling the United States, Britain, Germany and France as “extremist countries”.
“Even if all the claims on Iran’s program’s shortcomings are true, they cannot be resolved within the 45 days given to Iran,” he added, accusing some Western states of not wishing “to resolve the issue technically and legally”.
IAEA Director Mohamed El-Baradei warned Tehran that it could be declared in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if it failed to answer all the agency’s questions. But the resolution immediately sparked some calls in Tehran for the country’s clerical leadership to follow the path of North Korea and pull out of the NPT.
State television said in a commentary that the resolution was “political”, and “directed by the United States and the Zionist regime (Israel)”. And conservative MP Akbar Alami, a member of the Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, told IRNA that the current wave of “pressure on Iran is due to its membership of the NPT”, and that “therefore Iran’s membership of the NPT should be annulled.”
The hard-line Kayhan newspaper, which also advocated pulling out of the NPT, accused European Union countries and the United States of seeking to “completely disarm Iran and convert it to a weak and feeble country like Iraq in order to overrun it.”
Before the resolution was passed, powerful former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said in a Friday prayer sermon that “what is happening now in Vienna is an unjust, tyrannical and unilateral process.” Rafsanjani, still one of Islamic Iran’s most influential leaders, said that “no regime will accept such a thing, and in fact one of the objectives of our revolution was to struggle against those who want to force us to submit to their will,” he said.
