Iran Reverses Course, Will Allow IAEA Visit

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — After denying entry to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors over the weekend, Iran has now agreed to allow the visit later this month, the agency announced today (see GSN, March 12).

As the agency’s Board of Governors moved closer Friday to passing a resolution criticizing Iran — ultimately approved Saturday — for withholding information on its nuclear program, Iran announced it would bar entry to inspectors who, according to a Western diplomat in Vienna, were about to leave for Tehran. “They probably had their cases packed,” the diplomat said.

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei announced today that Iran has set March 27 as the new date for the inspectors’ arrival.

“Although the delay is regrettable, it is nonetheless still within our time schedule for conducting inspections. I hope and trust there will be no future delay with respect to any future inspections in Iran. It is clearly in the interest of Iran to cooperate fully with the IAEA and adopt a policy of proactive cooperation so that the IAEA can clarify outstanding issues as early as possible,” said ElBaradei, who arrived yesterday in the United States for a week of high-level meetings.

Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, now chairman of the country’s powerful Expediency Council, said yesterday that Iran will not give up nuclear activities it says are for peaceful purposes but will cooperate with the IAEA inspectors.

“We are determined to use nuclear energy for peaceful advantages and would never put it aside, and, at the same time, we are ready to show to the whole world that we will conduct our activities with all transparency, so there would be no concerns raised,” Rafsanjani said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Speaking Saturday after the board passed its resolution, U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Brill slammed Iran’s cancellation of this week’s inspection visit.

“Is it possible that, even as we meet, squads of Iranian technicians are working at still-undeclared sites to tile over, paint over, buy, burn or cart away incriminating evidence?” Brill said, according to Agence France-Presse.

In the resolution approved Saturday, the IAEA board ― pushed hard by the United States, which has accused Iran of seeking a nuclear bomb ― criticized Tehran over nuclear activities that have come to light in recent months but deferred further action until it next meets in June.

In October, Iran submitted to the agency what it called a complete picture of its nuclear programs, but the accounting did not include mention of several programs that the agency has since uncovered (see GSN, Feb. 24).

Amid strong objections to the draft by Nonaligned Movement countries seeking a softer line on Iran, the board suspended its meeting Thursday to allow for unofficial negotiations on the resolution, then worked into Friday night and held a rare Saturday session. In the end, the panel adopted a resolution largely identical to a draft agreed on early in the week by the United States and key European countries (see GSN, March 10).

“I think that the board was very clear,” ElBaradei told reporters Saturday.

“It welcomed and recognized Iran’s cooperation, both in providing us access to sites we are seeking and also in suspending enrichment and reprocessing activities, but at the same time, the board expressed concern that … some of Iran’s nuclear activities have not been reported to us in October and made it very clear that Iran has to be proactive, that it has to provide us all the information in a prompt and detailed manner,” the director general said.

In the resolution, the board states that it “deplores that Iran … omitted any reference, in its letter of Oct. 21, 2003, which was to have provided the ‘full scope of Iranian nuclear activities’ and a ‘complete centrifuge R&D [research and development] chronology,’ to its possession of P-2 centrifuge design drawings and to associated research, manufacturing and mechanical testing activities ― which the director general [in a Feb. 24 report] describes as ‘a matter of serious concern, particularly in view of the importance and sensitivity of those activities.’”

The panel “echoes the concern expressed by the director general over the issue of the purpose of Iran’s activities related to experiments on the production and intended use of polonium 210,” an isotope that can be used to facilitate nuclear explosions. The board “calls on Iran to be proactive in taking all necessary steps on an urgent basis to resolve all outstanding issues, including the issue of LEU [low-enriched uranium] and HEU [highly enriched uranium] contamination at the Kalaye Electric Co. workshop and Natanz, the issue of the nature and scope of Iran’s laser isotope enrichment research and the issue of the experiments on the production of polonium 210.”

The level of detail provided in the text was unusual for a Board of Governors resolution, suggesting to several observers that the United States and other hard-liners intended to establish in the resolution a record of Iran’s missteps that could be cited later when seeking further action against the country.

At the end of its resolution, the board “decides to defer until its June meeting … consideration of progress in verifying Iran’s declarations and of how to respond to the above-mentioned omissions.” Actions available to the panel include reporting violators to the U.N. Security Council, which may impose economic or other sanctions.

“If the IAEA [board at its June meeting] finds their [the Iranian authorities’] actions unsatisfactory, it has the option of referring it to the Security Council for action. I won’t prejudge now what those actions might be, but the Iranians need to understand that the international community is not going to just sit by idly while they continue to move in the direction of a nuclear weapon,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday on Fox News Sunday.

Although Iran is not a Board of Governors member, Iranian representative Amir Zamaninia issued a statement Saturday at the meeting criticizing the board in general and the United States in particular over the resolution, which he deemed unnecessary.

“A large number of countries did not consider this session, with a transitional report by the D.G. [director general], to be an appropriate occasion for a substantive text to be adopted. A resolution is being imposed ― and I think I am using the expression with the true definition of the word ― on the board by a single country through [a] few associates nonetheless,” said Zamaninia, director general for international political affairs in the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

Zamaninia blasted Washington for advancing a “narrow-minded, increasingly isolated conviction” that Iran has pursued nuclear weapons. Criticizing the United States for “prejudiced ideological emotions,” he said the U.S. stance contradicts the IAEA view that Iran has been mostly cooperative.

“Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful. The agency’s inspections will progressively confirm this assertion. Against this background, the attempt to unravel this otherwise healthy process … is clearly out of order. There is a fervent unjustified desire to maintain undue pressure on Iran through misrepresentation of facts, over exaggeration of minor misgivings and excessive prejudgments,” he said.

“If the current process would be allowed to proceed within its positive context of mutual confidence and cooperation, we have no doubt that … questions referred to in the director general’s report will be settled by the next board meeting,” Zamaninia said.

Zamaninia rejected the board’s accusations point by point, lingering over the question of Iran’s P-2 centrifuge design. “The issue of P-2 has been unduly exaggerated by the media and the agency,” he said, criticizing by name several British and U.S. newspapers. “All the research and manufacturing are done by a small private workshop and are limited to making components for only one set of centrifuge[s] with several rotors, and these few components are now in a storage [facility] visited by the inspectors,” Zamaninia said.

“The crux of the matter,” Zamaninia added, “seems to be a difference of view between us and the agency on this issue as far as the timing of reporting.” Zamaninia said Iran viewed its October declaration as linked only to obligations under its IAEA safeguards agreement and planned to report its P-2 activity later, in a declaration related to the safeguards agreement’s Additional Protocol, which Iran signed last year.

Following the disagreements among board members that Zamaninia cited, panel members have prevailed on the agency to take the unprecedented step of publishing a transcript of last week’s meetings on its Web site. The effort is now under way.

“This is basically Brill and Zamaninia [engaging in gamesmanship]. I don’t know if anyone’s going to ever find it useful to go through every bit of debate,” one diplomat said.

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