TEHRAN, 14 December 2005 — Iran said yesterday it was not interested in “condescending” security guarantees from the United States, rejecting an idea which the UN’s atomic watchdog chief hopes could ease tensions over the Islamic republic’s nuclear drive. “Iran does not need these kind of condescending guarantees and has a good enough capacity to defend itself,” Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani was quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA.
Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, urged Washington on Monday to put security assurances on the table with Iran as it had done in similar talks with North Korea. Speaking after being handed the Nobel Peace Prize, Baradei said such a step could bring a breakthrough in efforts to persuade Iran to limit its nuclear fuel activities, seen by the West as a weapons drive. Tehran says its program is purely for peaceful purposes.
Larijani, the hard-line secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, argued that the West needed to realize that Iran was not the problem in the region. “Iran is surrounded by countries like Israel which have the atomic bomb, and we just want that to be understood,” he was quoted as saying.
Government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham also told reporters that any talks with the Americans — with whom diplomatic relations were cut a quarter of a century ago - were “not on the agenda.” Washington has also already rejected the idea of offering incentives to a country it has lumped into an “axis of evil.” US Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said all dealings with Tehran should focus on “a consistent and established pattern of Iranian misbehavior and Iranian violation of its commitments and Iranian deception.”
Meanwhile, Iran’s defense minister was threatened with the sack yesterday after a group of lawmakers pushed through an impeachment motion following last week’s crash of a decrepit military plane in Tehran which killed 108 people. A Parliament source told AFP that the speaker of the Majlis had accepted the motion — backed by 49 MPs in the 290-seat assembly — meaning Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar will have to answer tough questions over the crash within 10 days.
His appearance in Parliament will be followed by a confidence vote among deputies, who have the power to sack any member of the government. The aged Lockheed C-130 transport plane crashed into the foot of a high-rise housing block last Tuesday after suffering engine failure.
Of the 108 fatalities, 68 were journalists, photographers and media technicians traveling on the aircraft to report on military exercises in the south of Iran.
