UK, Paris and Berlin offer Iran new deal

By Mark Turner, Daniel Dombey, and Frances Williams
May 10, 2006
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/99fb9796-df85-11da-afe4-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=d4f2ab60-c98e-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html 
France, Germany and the UK yesterday decided to make Iran a fresh offer to resolve the dispute over its nuclear programme, less than 24 hours after foreign ministers from the world's big powers failed to agree a common stance on the issue.
Senior diplomats meeting in New York agreed that the three European Union countries would negotiate a package of benefits to offer Iran if it chose to comply with international demands to cease nuclear enrichment, a process that can generate weapons-grade material.
The move came after a letter from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad to President George W Bush had seemed to highlight the divisions between the big powers by indicating that Iran was more willing to negotiate than was the US.
A western diplomat said EU foreign ministers would discuss the new package at a meeting in Brussels on Monday, adding that debate on the contentious issue of whether to invoke the UN's Chapter 7 enforcement powers would wait until later.
The decision comes after Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, insisted at this week's meeting with his counterparts from the permanent members of the UN Security Council that Iran needed to be offered clear benefits for cooperating.
Iran rejected a previous EU compromise last August, but the new package - which has yet to be formulated - is expected to offer more technical aid for Iran's nuclear programme, perhaps including help building reactors.
Washington had argued in recent weeks that the focus of the international community needed to be on pushing Iran to comply rather than providing new inducements. But diplomats said that after repeated failures to convince Russia to sign up to a tough draft Security Council resolution on Iran, Washington had not raised any opposition to the idea of a new offer.
The development marks a small-scale success in the Europeans' attempts to bolster their bargaining position with Iran by developing both threats of sanctions - which Russia had opposed - and incentives - which the US had rejected.
EU diplomats hope that the new offer will also open the way to Russia's endorsement of a Security Council resolution under Chapter 7.
Moscow has proposed invoking only certain articles of Chapter 7, leaving out those that might authorise sanctions or military force. A senior western diplomat suggested that was still on the table, as was the possibility of invoking article 41, which allows sanctions, but not article 42, which can authorise force.
The five permanent Security Council members have all called on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment. Tehran, which insists its purposes are purely peaceful, has accelerated its programme.
After the meeting Frank-Walter Steinmeier, German foreign minister, said it could take another two weeks to agree a resolution. That would still leave time to set a month-long deadline for Iran ahead of July's summit of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations in St Petersburg, Russia.