Snags cleared in Iran nuclear accord
Solutions found during talks; ratification awaits
Iran said Friday that talks in Geneva with the group of six world powers had resolved all outstanding issues on how to carry out an agreement reached in November that would temporarily halt some of Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.
Iran’s state television quoted Abbas Araghchi, the deputy foreign minister and deputy nuclear negotiator, as saying the agreement would now need final approval from all the governments: Iran and the P5-plus-1 countries — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, which are the five permanent U.N. Security Council members, plus Germany.
He was quoted as saying, “We found solutions for all the points of disagreements, but the implementation of the Geneva agreement depends on the final ratification of the capitals.”
Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Mr. Araghchi as saying an official announcement on the date for
implementing the pact would come in the next few days. Officials privately said it is Jan. 20.
A spokesman for the P5-plus-1 side of the talks, represented by Helga Schmid, deputy to the lead negotiator, Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, issued an emailed statement that did not go quite as far as Iran’s. “Deputy Secretary General Schmid and Deputy Foreign Minister Araghchi made very good progress on all the pertinent issues,” said the statement from spokesman Michael Mann. “This is now under validation at political level in capitals.”
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki referred reporters in Washington to the same statement. “So at the moment, capitals are looking at what’s been achieved in Geneva, and we hope to finalize the implementation agreement soon,” she said.
The two-day round of talks in Geneva was held against a backdrop of rising pressure to implement the agreement reached nearly two months ago. The pact was hailed at the time as a diplomatic breakthrough that could lead to a resolution of the decade-old dispute over Iran’s nuclear activities. Western countries and Israel say those activities are a cloak to achieve the capacity to make nuclear weapons, while Iran says they are purely for peaceful purposes.
The six-month duration specified in the agreement was meant to give negotiators time to reach a far more comprehensive accord. But the entire diplomatic process has come under extreme criticism, albeit for completely different reasons, both from U.S. sanctions advocates and hard-line conservatives in Iran.
The sanctions advocates, including a growing number of U.S. lawmakers, say Iran has exploited optimism created by recent months’ positive diplomacy to advance what they call its military nuclear ambitions and circumvent sanctions, which they contend must be intensified to keep up coercive pressure.
Their criticism deepened with a Reuters report Friday, quoting anonymous sources in Iran and Russia, as saying the countries were close to completing an oil-for-goods swap worth $1.5 billion a month to Iran that would substantially raise its oil exports, which have been severely constrained by the sanctions. Russian and Iranian officials did not comment on the Reuters report.
Particularly upsetting to sanctions advocates was that Russia is a member of the P5-plus-1 group negotiating to resolve the nuclear dispute with Iran.
“This reckless and irresponsible move raises serious questions about Russia’s commitment to ending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons,” New York Rep. Eliot L. Engel, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s ranking Democrat, said in a statement. “This swap would give Iran the impression that it doesn’t have to implement the interim agreement or negotiate a final agreement in order to resume its engagement with the international community.”
Senate support has been growing for tough new sanctions legislation that could come to a vote in coming weeks, despite Obama administration efforts to delay it. Iran has said such a measure would kill further diplomacy.
In Iran, objections to the diplomacy have come from the hard-line conservative constituency partly sidelined with the June election of President Hassan Rouhani, considered a relatively moderate cleric who had pledged to resolve the nuclear dispute and free Iran from sanctions. The conservatives have said the West, most notably the United States, remains a clever and beguiling foe that wants to rob Iran of what they call its nuclear rights.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on the nuclear issue, has given Mr. Rouhani’s administration some latitude to negotiate an accord. But he has often inveighed against the United States, a reflection of his own suspicion about U.S. intentions and the three-decade-old estrangement between the two nations.
In a blunt reminder of that legacy, a prominent Khamenei disciple, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahhedi-Kermani, who led Tehran’s Friday Prayers, told Iran’s nuclear negotiators in his sermon that their U.S. counterparts belonged to “the Great Satan” and could not be trusted. “Do not be deceived by their smiles,” he said, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. “The enemy is the enemy.”