Iran said Sunday it would reject any demand to stop what it
calls peaceful nuclear work, a day before European foreign
ministers discuss incentives and penalties designed to rein in
Teheran's atomic ambitions.
European Union foreign ministers will meet today to work out
technical, trade and political sweeteners that would be offered to
Iran in exchange for allaying Western fears it is seeking to
produce an atom bomb, notably by halting uranium enrichment.
Iran, the world's fourth largest oil exporter, insists its
nuclear plans are purely to make electricity and says it will not
give up enrichment.
"Any proposal that obliges us to stop peaceful (nuclear)
activities would not have value and would not be valid," Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech broadcast on state
television.
He accused the Europeans of living in a "colonialist world" and
said Teheran would not accept decisions reached in Brussels.
"If they want to decide things that concern us in a place where
we are not present, then that body does not have any legal validity
or credibility in decision-making," Ahmadinejad said.
Washington agreed to let Britain, France and Germany devise a
package of benefits for Iran in return for cooperating, putting
back a decision on a possible resolution.
"The aim is to come up with a very attractive package to make it
difficult for the Iranian Government to refuse," said a senior
envoy from one of the so-called "EU3" countries.
A draft statement for today's EU meeting stated the bloc was
ready to help Teheran develop "a safe, sustainable and
proliferation-proof civilian nuclear program" while insisting it
halt all enrichment on its soil.
Several Iranian officials have recently focused on saying Iran
must be allowed to keep at least an enrichment research program,
suggesting Teheran might be ready to scrap plans for
industrial-scale production of uranium fuel as part of a deal.
"We should first see what the (EU) proposal is. Anyway, we will
not abandon our right. (Nuclear) research and development will
remain on Iran's agenda," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza
Asefi told a weekly news conference.
But Washington has said all such work must stop and the draft EU
proposals rule out even enrichment for research.
Western diplomats say keeping even a small-scale enrichment
program at home would enable Iran to master a technology that could
quickly be expanded for military purposes in the future if Teheran
chose.
Iran argues that its right to enrichment is enshrined in the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treat (NPT), which allows signatories to
carry out the whole range of research, development and production
activities to produce nuclear energy.
(China Daily May 15, 2006)
