GENEVA/TEHRAN, 26 May 2005 — Major European powers and Iran have agreed to continue talks over Tehran’s controversial nuclear program amid signs they could strike a deal soon, foreign ministers and negotiators said after a last-ditch meeting in Geneva yesterday to avert an escalation in the dispute.
Iran pledged to maintain a suspension of its uranium enrichment program agreed in Paris last November, Iranian chief negotiator Hassan Rohani said, indicating that progress was made in the high-level talks.
“We believe following what was discussed today we could come to an agreement in a reasonably short time,” Rohani told journalists after meeting the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany in Geneva.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the three EU powers, known as the EU-3, had told Iranian negotiators they would make new proposals to Tehran in late July or August. “The European side said that it would take detailed proposals to Iran by the end of July or the beginning of August, as outlined and discussed today and earlier by our officials, in the context of the Paris agreement remaining in force,” Straw told journalists.
Iranian negotiators had warned before the meeting that a deadlock was looming amid plans to reopen a nuclear plant in central Iran, warning that the Geneva talks were a “final chance”. “The Paris agreement remains in place... We kept this show on the road,” a European official said.
Earlier in Tehran, members of Iran’s hard-line Islamist Basij militia held a string of demonstrations outside the embassies of Britain, France and Germany yesterday to defend the Islamic republic’s right to have a nuclear program.
“France, England and Germany are slaves of Israel,” the group of up to 300 student Basij members chanted as they walked through the city center where the diplomatic missions are located.
Police and anti-riot forces kept a close eye outside the British and German embassies but there was no sign of stone throwing and the protestors kept an orderly distance from the embassy gates, an AFP reporter said.
