Iran denounced a UN watchdog report on its nuclear drive as "politicized" ahead of a debate by the agency's board yesterday opening the way to UN Security Council action over suspicions Tehran wants atom bombs.
The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation board of governors reported Iran to the Security Council a month ago, and urged it to halt uranium-enrichment work and to stop stonewalling IAEA probes into the nature of its nuclear program.
But the report by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei given to this week's board session said Tehran had generally flouted the Feb. 4 appeal by expanding a pilot enrichment drive, inviting council intervention that could lead to consideration of sanctions.
An Iranian collision course with the council looked more likely after Tehran brushed aside what EU diplomats said was a Russian offer to let it do some atomic research if it refrained from enriching uranium on an industrial scale for seven to nine years.
The US and its key EU allies Britain, France and Germany also rebuffed the idea because they said it would not have prevented Iran perfecting bomb technology via enrichment research.
Stung by the rejection of its trial balloon after private discussions with Western leaders about the matter were leaked to news media, Moscow then publicly closed ranks with Washington and the EU3 by declaring it had not drafted any new plan.
Iran insists on a right to a peaceful atomic industry as a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has charged that the IAEA's resort to the Security Council was driven by a US-led agenda to isolate and topple its Islamist government.
"The purely technical nuclear issue of the Islamic Republic of Iran is politicized," the Iranian government said in a statement on ElBaradei's report released just before yesterday's debate.
"Bias, exaggerated and unjustified information has misled the international community," the statement said.
It added that Iran had bent over backward to cooperate with IAEA inquiries over the past three years, providing "voluminous information," granting access to military sites and arranging interviews even though such steps were not required by the NPT.
ElBaradei said Iran's compliance with probes remained selective. He gave examples where it withheld documents, denied access to people the IAEA wanted to query and failed to clarify allegations of military links to nuclear research.
In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned yesterday that the world must give in to what he said was Iran's right to enrich uranium.
"Our nation has made its decision to fully use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and all have to give in to this decision made by the Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad said.
"If anybody seeks to violate our rights, the Iranian nation will place the sign of disgrace on their forehead," he told thousands of people gathered in Khorramabad, capital of Lorestan Province in western Iran.
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