Europe and Iran to restart nuclear talks

By Roula Khalaf, Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Daniel Dombey
December 20, 2005
Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/15f08868-7184-11da-836e-0000779e2340.html

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European nuclear negotiators will meet their Iranian counterparts in Vienna on Wednesday in the first direct talks since negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme broke down in August.
But the resumption of contact comes amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Europe, exacerbated by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s recent outbursts against Israel and his denial of the Holocaust.
European diplomats stressed on Tuesday that the meeting was designed to explore whether a new basis could be found to resume nuclear negotiations.
“We have to agree on an agenda and on the conditions on which the talks will be held,” said a senior diplomat. “But it will be extremely hard to find an agreed basis given the approach of the new leadership in Iran.”
The diplomat warned that unless Iran showed some readiness to compromise, “the prospect of pursuing a policy to engage Iran may have run its course”.
Negotiations between Iran and the EU3 – the UK, France and Germany – collapsed in August after Iran rejected a European offer of incentives to abandon all its enrichment activities, a process that leads to the production of fuel for nuclear reactors or bombs.
Since then, Tehran has maintained its voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment but has restarted a pre-enrichment work at a plant in Isfahan.
In an attempt to woo Iran back to the negotiating table, the EU3 has backed down from its original demands. With unusual support from the US, which had previously pursued a harder line towards Tehran, the EU3 has backed a Russian compromise proposal that would allow Iran to continue enrichment in Russia, rather than on its own soil.
Last month, the Europeans also decided to postpone efforts to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council, whic
h would have been a first step towards the imposition of sanctions.
Tehran, however, has shown little enthusiasm for the Russian proposal and continues to insist that enrichment must take place inside Iran. The Europeans  own confidence in Russia s role as an honest broker has also dimmed after Moscow agreed to sell Tehran $1bn (¬ 840m, £570m) of missile defences.
Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said on Monday that Wednesday s talks would be focused on the  non-diversion  of
 Iran’s nuclear programme from civilian purposes and reiterated that “Iranians’ national determination in uranium enrichment is serious”.
“If we feel the talks are constructive, this trend [of talks] will continue,” Mr Larijani said. 
The talks have been complicated by the arrival of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, a fundamentalist president who appears to favour Iranian isolation, rather than integration with the world community. His remarks about Israel have made European diplomatic engagement with Iran more difficult.
The tense relations were underlined by an EU statement on Tuesday highlighting “deep concern” at the state of human rights in Iran. 
In recent weeks, Iran has been celebrating Europe and the US’s decision not to refer Iran to the Security Council at the November meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency. 
Kayhan, a conservative newspaper, wrote in an editorial on Monday that Iran’s “experience of talks with Europe for the past couple of years shows.
	 .	 .	 such talks would be meaningless unless Iran employs the language of the other side, which is power and force .
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