Iran’s foreign minister headed to New York yesterday to resume nuclear talks with major powers, but it was unclear if there would be a repeat visit by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who launched Tehran’s opening a year ago.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was to hold a working lunch with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton, the lead negotiator for the six powers, his deputy Abbas Araqchi said.
The two diplomats will set the terms for the relaunch of negotiations for a comprehensive deal on the future scope of Iran’s nuclear program to allay international concerns about its ambitions, Araqchi told Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency.
The talks today and tomorrow are to take place on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the same venue where in September last year Rouhani held a historic telephone call with US President Barack Obama, overcoming more than three decades of estrangement between the two governments.
The honeymoon period after that call saw Tehran strike an interim deal with the six powers that gave it some relief from Western economic sanctions in return for scaling back its more sensitive nuclear activities.
Iranian officials have sounded a more pessimistic note in recent days about the prospects for hammering out a comprehensive deal by a Nov. 24 deadline.
“The disagreements are serious,” Araqchi said of the renewed negotiations after the two sides missed an earlier, July target date for a deal. “We hope that after the discussions that we have had with the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese, and the talks we will have on Wednesday and Thursday, we will able to make progress.”
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi sounded a similar note of caution after talks in Geneva on Thursday last week with the other three powers involved in the negotiations — Britain, France and Germany.
“After two rounds of negotiations with the European representatives, our positions have not been reconciled and disagreements over serious questions still exist,” Takht-Ravanchi said on Saturday last week.
The six powers, all of which except Germany sit on the UN Security Council and have nuclear weapons themselves, want Iran to scale back its atomic program to ease fears the Islamic republic gets the bomb. Tehran, which says its nuclear program is exclusively for power generation and medical uses, in return wants painful EU and US sanctions lifted.
The main stumbling block remains the size of Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium, a process that can make fuel for peaceful nuclear uses, but also the core of an atomic bomb.
Also at issue is the timeframe for the lifting of sanctions that Western governments regard as the essential lever that brought Tehran to the negotiating table.
Rouhani has yet to decide whether to travel to New York for the UN General Assembly, Iranian media said.
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