TEHRAN, 13 September 2005 — Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak tomorrow to the United Nations General Assembly in New York to brief the world community about Tehran’s new nuclear initiative, the Fars news agency reported yesterday.
Ahmadinejad and his chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, will leave Tehran today to New York and make his speech the following day, Fars reported.
The contents of the new initiative have been kept secret but observers believe that Iran would not accept the international society’s demand to freeze its nuclear programs and most probably, like his predecessor, too, offer new guarantees that Iran’s nuclear projects would remain peaceful.
The news network Khabar quoted Ahmadinejad yesterday as telling Iranian diplomats abroad that they should “fiercely defend” the legitimate rights of the Iranian nation and show no concessions.
Iran has only on more week before the Sept. 19 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting in Vienna where the 35-nation governing board might refer the Iran case to the United Nations Security Council.
Tehran rejected last month’s IAEA demand to stop nuclear conversion activities in the Isfahan plant in central Iran and has in the meantime stressed several times that there would be no return from the nuclear activities despite the consequences which might also include more sanctions against the Islamic state.
Iran says it will cooperate fully with UN nuclear inspectors provided it is allowed to make nuclear fuel.
Iran “declares that it is determined to continue its full cooperation with the IAEA ... provided that Iran is not deprived from its inalienable rights for peaceful uses of nuclear energy, including nuclear fuel cycle,” it said. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Sunday did not rule out that the Iranian Parliament would react to a possible referral of the Iran case to the UNSC. One of the reactions by the Parliament could be prohibiting further IAEA inspections.
Meanwhile, Iranian Vice-President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who heads his country’s atomic energy agency, arrived in Moscow yesterday for a brief working visit, with Russia’s work on a nuclear power station high on the agenda, Iranian diplomats said.
