Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Friday that Tehran would not use oil as a weapon in the row over its nuclear program and was open to compromise, comments that caused the price of oil to plummet.
But the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohammed ElBaradei, said it was up to the Iranians to create the conditions for a resumption of collapsed negotiations aimed at resolving its nuclear standoff with the West.
Mottaki stressed that Iran would not give up its right to develop nuclear energy for civilian use, which he said was enshrined in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
"We're not going to use energy as political leverage," Mottaki told reporters in Geneva, where he is on a two-day visit.
The recent decision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to pass Iran's nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council has raised fears that the fourth-largest oil exporter might retaliate by cutting off its oil supply.
Oil markets responded to Mottaki's comments, with the price of US light crude dropping US$0.78 cents to US$66.37 per barrel, after rallying 4 percent over the course of the week.
Iran says it is only interested in peaceful nuclear power and does not want atomic weapons. But it concealed sensitive atomic fuel activities from the IAEA for nearly 20 years.
The EU's three biggest nations -- Germany, France and Britain -- called off two-and-a-half years of talks with Iran after it announced in January that it would resume enrichment work and shortly thereafter began small-scale purification of uranium.
ElBaradei said in an interview that what was needed was "a diplomatic solution through transparency and cooperation by Iran to build necessary confidence and create conditions for the return to negotiations with the international community."
The so-called EU3 has made a re-suspension of enrichment a condition for the renewal of talks, but Tehran has refused, saying enrichment is a sovereign right it will never abandon.
ElBaradei has been unable to verify that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively peaceful in three years of inspections, though he has found no hard evidence that Iran wants atom bombs.
The Security Council on Wednesday gave Iran 30 days to halt enrichment and asked for a report from the IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog in Vienna, on whether Tehran had done so.
But Mottaki said a compromise was still possible.
"But if you are referring to the possibility that Iran is going to give up its legal rights [to enrich], that is just not going to happen," he said.
Mottaki said Iran was only willing to negotiate regarding industrial scale-enrichment. But the EU3 and US want Iran to halt all enrichment, including small-scale research.
Meanwhile yesterday, Iran's state news agency IRMA quoted Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki as saying the UN Security Council deadline on Iran's nuclear program has "complicated" the nuclear row.
"The UN deadline has made it more complicated for all sides to take the next steps for a rational settlement of the row," Mottaki said.
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