‘We Need To Verify’: UN Nuclear Chief ‘Still Hopeful’ Over Iran Probe
The United Nations nuclear head said Friday his discussions with Tehran over its atomic program lacked “the momentum” needed to get “back to life.”
The United Nations nuclear head said Friday his discussions with Tehran over its atomic program lacked “the momentum” needed to get “back to life.”
Speaking to the government-sponsored Mediterranean Dialogues conference in Rome, Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), expressed concern at lack of progress in discussions over uranium traces found in ‘non-nuclear’ sites and at Tehran’s recent decision to enrich uranium to 60 percent at a second atomic facility.
The IAEA reported in early November that Iran had agreed to meet during the month to discuss the uranium traces, which the agency discovered in 2021, but the meetings have not taken place. Grossi signaled back in May that he found answers given by Iran unsatisfactory. In June and mid-November, the 35-state IAEA board of governors passed resolutions censoring Tehran. “We don’t seem to be seeing eye-to-eye with Iran over their obligations to the IAEA,” Grossi told the conference.
Tehran has argued that the discovery of uranium traces, which relate to work carried out before 2003, came only after allegations made by Israel in 2018. But Grossi has said that adequate explanations are required under Tehran’s basic ‘safeguards’ commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) particularly to establish what subsequently happened to the uranium.
Iran has also argued that IAEA questioning into the uranium traces should be shelved as part of reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Talks beginning early 2021 to restore the JCPOA, which the US left in 2018, reached stalemate in the summer.
Grossi said Friday he was “still hopeful” Tehran would satisfy the agency over the uranium traces. “We need to put our relationship back on track,” he argued.
The IAEA has charted in successive reports the expanding Iranian program, which began to exceed JCPOA limits in 2019, the year after the US left the JCPOA, which curbed Iran’s nuclear program in return for easing international sanctions.
‘Tripling capacity’
Grossi said that Iran’s recent announcement over enriching to 60 percent at Fordow, in addition to the 60-percent enrichment that began at the Natanz site in 2021, was “tripling, not doubling…their capacity to enrich uranium at 60 percent.” This brought Iran “very close to military level, which is 90 percent,” Grossi added, referring to the purity usually required for an atomic weapon. Under the JCPOA, Iran enriched only to 3.67 percent, and has also increased the efficiency and speed of enriching by using more advanced centrifuges that were barred under the 2015 agreement.
The IAEA director-general has also expressed consistent concern at Iran limiting agency monitoring to that required by the NPT. Tehran began reducing access in early 2021 in response to the killing of a scientist and attacks on sites, both widely attributed to Israel. “We need to go, we need to verify,” Grossi said Friday.
During an interview with Foreign Policy’s podcast Playlist released on Wednesday, Malley said that the US and Iran came very close to reaching an agreement to revive the 2015 nuclear deal – or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- many times in the past two years, the latest of which was in August, but each time Iran stepped back and came up with new demands that often had nothing to do with the nuclear talks.
“We'll have the sanctions, pressure and diplomacy. If none of that works, the President has said, and, as a last resort, he will agree to a military option because if that’s what it takes to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, that’s what will happen. But we’re not there," he said.
Defending the Biden administration’s efforts to keep diplomacy as an option and criticizing the Trump administration for its maximum-pressure campaign, he said, “We owe it to ourselves to have an honest examination of how sanctions work and how they don’t work.”
The Iranian system as a whole is divided, and not yet concluded whether they really want to come back to the deal, and so each time Tehran was presented with a deal, even about the deals that were considered fair by other parties such as Russia and China, Iran was the one that walked back.
“Iran has rejected countless opportunities to come back to the deal... We are prepared for a world with the JCPOA and without the JCPOA. We’ve continued to put pressure on Iran... We made sure there are sanctions for their support for terrorism, their human rights violations, for their ballistic missile program and for their nuclear program,” he added. “The JCPOA is not on the agenda because of Iran’s position, and we’re continuing with our policy to respond to all of Iran’s destabilizing activities.”
Malley also said reviving the deal would be dead when the non-proliferation benefits of the deal do not justify or warrant the sanctions relief that the US is ready to offer, emphasizing that the US focus and energy are not on the deal. Currently, the focus is on what is happening in Iran and its support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
He also talked about many troubling issues emanating from Iran, saying the US supports aspirations of the Iranian people to achieve the fundamental rights and freedoms that all peoples across the globe should enjoy. “We are mobilizing international attention, putting the spotlight on what’s happening in Iran. It’s very important that the world know at a time when the Iranian regime is trying to hide what’s happening and to distort what’s happening,” he said.
The administration has also put the spotlight on developments in Iran by sanctioning those up and down the chain who are violating the basic rights of the Iranian people, “whether it’s a top leadership or whether it’s an anonymous person in a prison,” Malley noted. “The world should know who is behind that repression.”
He also said Washington is pushing for measures against the Islamic Republic in international bodies, mentioning the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council and the move to kick out Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “It’s an aberration, a complete anomaly, that Iran would be on the commission that is supposed to defend the rights of women when they are repressing them,” he added.
The US will continue to voice its support for the Iranians who are protesting for their rights, he reiterated, saying that “it's an extraordinary page in Iran’s history that’s being written right now.”
Praising “the courage, the determination, the persistence and the creativity of Iranians, particularly women and girls,” Malley said “we’re not going to be the authors; we can be there to express support for the fundamental rights of Iranians. This page will be written by Iranians themselves. It won’t be written in Washington, in London or anywhere around the globe other than Iran.”
Also on Wednesday, The US secretary of state says that the Islamic Republic has a deeply incorrect understanding of its people and is trying to blame others for the current protests.
Speaking to a large crowd on Thursday, General Hossein Salami also tried to present the IRGC and its paramilitary Basij as “servants of the people,” amid a popular uprising in which security forces have so far killed around 450 civilians since mid-September.
Salami repeated regime slogans about “independence” and “self-sufficiency” and said, Khamenei “has turned a few issues into a matter of pride that America cannot swallow. One of these is his strong stand on the issue of JCPOA, and it has reached a stage when the acceptance or rejection of the JCPOA has no importance for Iran.”
After 18 months of indirect negotiations by the Biden Administration to revive the 2015 nuclear accord known as the JCPOA, talks broke down in early September, when the US rejected excessive demands by Iran.
Salami also praised the 83-year-old authoritarian ruler for spreading the influence of the Islamic Republic to other countries, adding that “enemies” cannot accept “this development.”
The Islamic regime uses the term “enemies” to refer to the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and lately Western Europe, as many countries have criticized its use of deadly violence against protesters.
Many countries raise the issue of Tehran’s “malign activities” in the Middle East, by financially and militarily building a network of militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere.
The IRGC commander then went on repeating accusations made by Khamenei and other officials in the past two months against “enemies” for plotting to destroy Iran. At the same time, he claimed that Iran has become a “powerful force” and “the enemy is fleeing from the Islamic world.”
For this reason, he claimed, the United States is fomenting unrest in Iran, but the Iranian people “are standing up to America.”
In fact, thousands of Iranians across the country celebrated the defeat of Iran’s team by the US side in the World Cup on Tuesday, seeing the loss as a defeat for the regime that tries to use sports to strengthen its image.
The United States has repeatedly dismissed accusations that it has anything to do with the anti-regime protests. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that one of the “profound mistakes” that the “regime makes is in accusing the United States or any other country” of somehow being “responsible for, instigating what’s happening. That’s not at all the case. And to misunderstand their own people is at the heart of the problem that they’re facing.”
But the Biden Administration has also voiced support for Iranians to have the right to peacefully protest and officials have met with Iranian activists to underline that policy.
Blinken in a separate interview with NBC also reiterated the administration’s policy, saying “the most important thing that we can do is first to speak out very clearly ourselves in support of the people’s right to protest peacefully, to make their views known, and as I said, to take what steps we can take to go after those who are actually oppressing those rights, including through sanctions.”
Iranians mainly blame Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guard and its Basij paramilitaries for deadly use of violence against protesters. Many have reached the point that they will accept nothing short of a complete regime change and the establishment of a secular, democratic political system.
These statements appear to be attempts to reassure the restless public that sees the freeze in nuclear talks as yet another ominous sign for the country’s future.
Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Hassan Asafari, a former – and possibly current – Iranian intelligence officer, told Nameh News that the talks over Iran's controversial nuclear program will be resumed in January.
Referring to Foreign Minister Hosein Amir-Abdollahian's uncorroborated comments about messages being exchanged between Tehran and Washington, Nameh News website wrote that there are signs indicating the Americans are after finding the right go-between to resume the talks after a three-month freeze.
The United States has denied the claims that it is messaging Iran to resume the talks.
Meanwhile, he told Nameh News that “it is also in the United States' interest to try to solve its problems with Iran through negotiations." He added that less than two years before the next presidential elections in the United States, Democrats need to show some achievements to voters to help them keep the White House.
The lawmaker warned that if the Americans show no interest in resuming the talks, and decide to continue their pressures on Iran, Tehran has also options on the table that might not be in Washington's interest.
Asafari said: "The Americans have realized that there is no way other than negotiations to settle their difference with the Islamic Republic. They have also realized that threats, sanctions, pressures and an endless series of resolutions against Iran cannot force Tehran to retreat."
This comes while economic analyst Hadi Haghshenas says that the UN Human Rights Commission's recent resolution has left a negative impact on Iran's economy and coupled with the country's chronic economic crisis, it has made solving Iran's problems even more complicated than ever before.
Haghshenas told Nameh News: "Economic variables such as inflation, unemployment and even economic growth will be affected by both economic and non-economic factors including floods, earthquakes, sanctions and protests." He reminded that Iran’s currency rose every time there was a positive development about the negotiations with the West, and declined every time there seemed to be no prospect for success.
He reiterated that establishing an investigation committee under the supervision of the UN to probe into the use of force and violence by the government during the protests has adversely affected the status of the country's economy.
Nonetheless, like Asafari, political activist and commentator Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani is also adamant that diplomacy will resume once we see a decline in the protests.
Boastfully reiterating that Iran is the only country in the world that can say "No" to the United States, Ardestani said that naturally, the US will do anything to bring Iran under pressure. However, he argued, the West's policy toward Iran “depends on our domestic politics.” Currently, with unrest in Iran, “Westerners try to support the protests.” They work based on their interests.
"That is why they issued resolutions against Tehran at international forums to exert further pressures on Iran. But if Iran manages to come to terms with the protesters and leave the crisis behind, then the Americans would want to resume diplomacy," Ardestani said.
If Iran manages to calm down the protesters, Iran's nuclear case will not be sent to the Un Security Council, there will be no snap-back and no military action against Iran, he maintained.