Iran, new Amano term in focus at IAEA meeting

Deadlocked talks with Iran will be in focus at a meeting of the UN nuclear agency’s board from tomorrow, together with a possible new term for director general Yukiya Amano. Western powers, however, are expected to refrain from upping the ante against Tehran at the meeting in Vienna in order not to jeopardize parallel diplomatic efforts by six world powers, diplomats said. “My own instinct is that there won’t be an Iran resolution,” from the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors, one diplomat told AFP. “But it’s not definite yet.” This is despite the fact that Iran refuses to give the IAEA access to sites, documents and scientists involved in what the agency suspects were efforts, mostly in the past but possibly ongoing, to develop nuclear weapons. More than a year of meetings, the latest on February 13 in Tehran, have failed to agree on a so-called “structured approach” to address these allegations. The agency also conducts regular inspections of Iran’s declared nuclear sites and its quarterly reports routinely outline advances in its atomic program in spite of UN Security Council resolutions calling for a suspension. The latest report, issued February 21, said that Iran had begun installing at its Natanz plant more advanced centrifuges to speed up uranium enrichment, a process at the heart of the international community’s concerns. Tehran says that the IAEA’s conclusions about the “possible military dimensions” of its program are based on flawed information from Western and Israeli spy agencies, information that it says it has not been allowed to see. At a stormy IAEA board meeting in November, Iran’s envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh said that no “smoking gun” had ever been found and that the West wants to hijack the IAEA for its own ends. The US envoy shot back that Washington would seek in March to convince the IAEA board to report Iran to the UN Security Council if no “substantive cooperation” had begun over the IAEA’s probe. But in view of apparent tentative progress made at talks in Kazakhstan last Tuesday and Wednesday between Iran and six world powers, the United States and its allies in Vienna appear to have rowed back from this threat. Western countries were meanwhile hoping that in the closed-door meeting, scheduled to last four days, the IAEA board would approve Amano being given a second four-year term. The 65-year-old Japanese is the only candidate but formal board approval might be delayed until June or even September — his current term runs to December — if any countries have misgivings.