Reuters – European powers revive dialogue with Iran on Wednesday over suspicions it is secretly trying to make nuclear bombs, but weeks of tension have diminished hopes they will make headway in defusing the crisis.
Confrontation rather than compromise has been brewing after declarations from Iran that the Holocaust is a myth and Israel should be wiped out, and a European Union accusation on Tuesday that Tehran has serially violated human rights at home.
The Islamic republic’s increasingly vocal hostility toward the Jewish state and commitment to developing sensitive technology that could yield ingredients for nuclear weaponry have stoked Western concern about its atomic programme.
Tehran says it aims only to generate more electricity for an energy-hungry economy. But it dodged U.N. nuclear inspectors for 18 years until 2003 and the West says its cooperation since has fallen short of what is needed to regain diplomatic confidence.
Wednesday’s meeting between Iran and Britain, France and Germany in Vienna will be "talks about talks" — exploring whether any basis exists for resuming negotiations on the future of Iran’s nuclear activity, frozen by the "EU3" last August.
"We won’t reopen negotiations, we will only listen to what the Iranians have to say, especially about research and development," said an EU3 diplomat, alluding to centrifuge machines capable of enriching uranium to arms-grade level.
"We will see whether what they say to us in private is any different from what they have been declaring in public, to see if there is wiggle room for resuming negotiations."
EU diplomats said the likely outcome would be a decision, taken back in EU capitals, on whether to meet again in January.
But Tehran’s unswerving rejection of compromise proposals to have its uranium purified by others abroad, to minimise chances of it grasping the highly complex means to make bombs, has depressed optimism about a diplomatic resolution.
IRAN REJECTS "THREATS"
"Threats and unilateralism will be futile and rather make the situation more difficult for negotiators of both sides," influential ex-Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Tuesday, alluding to EU demands that Tehran abandon uranium enrichment in return for political and economic incentives.
"The correct procedure is to continue nuclear talks with patience with the aim of confidence-building. The negotiators engaging Iran should approach the issue with good intentions,"" the official news agency IRNA quoted him as saying.
Chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani signaled before the new talks that Tehran would pursue approval for enrichment, suspended under a 2004 Paris accord which the EU maintains should be inviolable.
"If that’s their only agenda, more dialogue will make little sense. The problem is, Iran’s hardliners were encouraged to believe they could inch forward toward enrichment when they managed to restart uranium processing without provoking a referral to the U.N. Security Council," another diplomat said.
In August the EU3 halted two years of negotiations for "objective guarantees from Iran to end "dual-use" nuclear work after Tehran resumed "conversion" of uranium ore, the first stage of the nuclear production cycle.
But subsequent U.S.-EU moves to send Iran’s case to the Security Council for possible sanctions stumbled on resistance by Russia, China and developing nations on the board of the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The IAEA board opted in November to put off any referral to give time for promoting an EU-backed proposal for Russia to enrich Iran’s uranium under a joint venture.
But Tehran has rebuffed the idea and interest in it seems to have waned in Moscow, which has major energy and arms links with Iran including a $1 billion nuclear reactor under construction and a $1 billion package of missiles and other hardware.
Room for conciliation at Wednesday’s talks seemed to narrow further with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust and the West’s furious response, including talk in Germany of retaliatory travel and trade bans.
Some analysts believe that if dialogue runs aground again, the way would be cleared to an emergency IAEA board session and vote to put Iran in Security Council hands. But Russia and China could veto sanctions as permanent powers on the Council.
