Agence France Presse – The People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI), a branch of the country’s exiled opposition, called Monday for the UN Security Council to intervene urgently in the controversy over Iranian nuclear plans.
"We ask the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to take a firm position on the Iran nuclear file and refer immediately to the UN Security council," said Firouz Mahvi, spokesman of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), political wing of the PMOI.
Amid Western fears that Tehran is secretly working on making nuclear weapons, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said at the agency’s headquarters here Monday he hoped an agreement could be reached soon to fears and avert punitive UN Security Council action.
As the IAEA opened a meeting here that could lead to international sanctions against Tehran, ElBaradei talked of a deal in around a week on the issue of Iran doing small-scale uranium enrichment.
But the Iranian opposition spokesman told AFP in the Viennese capital: "Iran is only buying time."
Some 150 opponents of the hardline regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demonstrated outside the UN offices in Vienna where the IAEA meeting was in progress.
"All the concessions with the mullahs have led to Ahmadinedjad at the top," the opposition spokesman said. "Iranian people don’t want and don’t need nuclear weapons and energy."
The NCRI has said previously a military option against Iran would be counter-productive, and has asked the European Union to withdraw the PMOI from its list of terrorist organizations.
Both the EU and the United States consider the PMOI a terrorist organization.
But the NCRI has in the past produced revelations about Iran’s nuclear program. In 2002 it disclosed the existence of a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, thus prompting an investigation by the UN nuclear watchdog.
The Iran dossier was at the top of the agenda at the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors here.
A deal on small-scale enrichment, and a resumption of talks between Tehran and the Europeans, would effectively head off Security Council action.
But Ahmadinejad has vowed his country would not be bullied.
"If they want to put political pressure on us, our decisions and behaviour will be reconsidered," the official news agency IRNA quoted him as saying.
