GENEVA – Iran and six world powers held their first talks in more than a year Monday, an exchange that officials said focused mostly on Tehran’s need to diffuse fears about its nuclear programs.
Delegates from Iran, the European Union, the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and Germany met at a conference center in Geneva, with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton greeting Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator, in the foyer.
“About 75 percent” of the three-hour morning session was devoted to nuclear issues, said an official close to the talks. That was significant, because the Islamic Republic had come to the table insisting that the negotiations address Iran’s nuclear program only peripherally — if at all.
Specific sensitive points included a renewed call by the world powers for an end to Tehran’s program of uranium enrichment — an activity that the Islamic Republic says is not up for negotiations, said the official, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing the confidential negotiations.
Tehran says it does not want atomic arms, but as it builds up its capacity to make such weapons, neither Israel nor the U.S. have ruled out military action if Tehran fails to heed U.N. Security Council demands to freeze key nuclear programs.
Ashton and senior officials from the six powers noted that doubts about the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program were among the sources of instability in the region, said the official.
Jalili’s comments included other themes — including mention of last week’s assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist and the wounding of an associate, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the talks.
Nations have a right to enrich uranium domestically and Iran insists it is doing so only to make fuel for an envisaged network of reactors and not to make fissile warhead material. But international concerns are strong because Tehran developed its enrichment program clandestinely and because it refuses to cooperate with an IAEA probe following up on suspicions that it experimented with components of a nuclear weapons program — something Iran denies.
Officials described the initial meeting as encouraging as the two sides broke for lunch of duck with olives, char fillet with sage, rice pilaf and desert. Bilateral sessions were planned for the afternoon, including a possible one between Jalili and U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns and their delegations.
Jalili planned to come back to the other participants with a response to their presentations, one official said.
Two days of talks have been scheduled. The world powers hope to get Iran to negotiate on its enrichment program — a request it has firmly denied in the past, the official said, adding that the powers would then meet with Iran again next year in Turkey, an Iranian ally and Tehran’s choice of venue.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, visiting Athens, sounded a note of optimism as the talks began.
“The success of the Geneva talks is affected by the approach the other side will show to today’s realities. For the necessary flexibility to be shown in the shaping of the agenda of the negotiations,” he told reporters.
But, underlining its commitment to enrichment, Iran on Sunday announced it had delivered its first domestically mined raw uranium to a processing facility, claiming it was now self-sufficient over the whole enrichment process.
Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and the country’s vice president, said Iran had for the first time delivered domestically mined raw uranium to a processing facility — allowing it to bypass U.N. sanctions prohibiting import of the material.
Salehi said the delivery proved that the mysterious bombings which targeted the Iranian scientists would not slow the country’s progress.
Iran acquired a considerable stock of yellowcake a uranium powder, from South Africa in the 1970s, as well as unspecified quantities of yellowcake from China long before the U.N. sanctions. Western nations said last year that Iran was running out of raw uranium and asserted that Tehran did not have sufficient domestic ore to run the large-scale civilian nuclear energy program it said it was assembling.
But Salehi said Iran was now self-sufficient over the entire nuclear fuel cycle — from extracting uranium ore to enriching it and producing nuclear fuel.
Since Iran’s clandestine enrichment program was discovered eight years ago, Iran has resisted both rewards — offers of technical and economic cooperation — and four sets of increasingly harsh U.N. sanctions meant to force it to freeze its enrichment program.
Israel has threatened to attack Iran, even though Israel is believed to have stockpiled more than 200 nuclear weapons and it is not a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said it was up to Iran to restore trust about its nuclear intentions, urging it to come to Geneva prepared to “firmly, conclusively reject the pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
But for Iran, the main issues are peace, prosperity — and nuclear topics only in the context of global disarmament.
“Iran has not and will not allow anybody in the talks to withdraw one iota of the rights of the Iranian nation,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said before the talks.
