VIENNA: Iran and six world powers are making little progress in arduous talks on ending their dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme, a senior US official said today, fanning doubt about the prospects for a breakthrough by a self-imposed July deadline.
Tehran also said the latest round of negotiations, which began in Vienna on Wednesday and were expected to end later on Saturday, were difficult and slow.
The powers want Iran to agree to scale back uranium enrichment and other sensitive nuclear activity and accept more rigorous UN inspections to deny it any capability of quickly producing atomic bombs, in exchange for an end to economic sanctions. Tehran denies having any such underlying ambition, saying its nuclear programme is for civilian energy only.
After three months of mostly comparing expectations rather than negotiating viable compromises, the sides planned at the May 13-16 meeting to start drafting the text of a final agreement that could end many years of enmity and mistrust and dispel fears of a devastating, wider Middle East war.
Both sides made clear this was an uphill struggle.
‘The West should avoid having excessive demands,’ an Iranian source close to the country’s negotiating team was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars News Agency. ‘The Iranian nation has shown that pressure on them always backfires.’
The US official, who declined to be named, said: ‘Talks have been slow and difficult. Significant gaps remain. Iran still has some hard decisions to make. We’re concerned that progress is not being made and that time is short.’
The US and Iranian statements might be designed in part to raise pressure on the other side but they also betrayed stubbornly deep differences that must be overcome if intense diplomacy is to succeed in clinching a final accord.
Still, the atmosphere remained businesslike enough for Iranian-US bilateral talks that lasted over two hours. Such meetings, once almost unimaginable, have become more common as the two foes have sought to re-establish official communications channels closed since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
This week’s Vienna gathering was the fourth round of negotiations between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia since February with the goal of a long-term deal by July 20.
Diplomats have disclosed that some headway was made during the previous three rounds on one of the thorniest issues – the future of Iran’s planned Arak heavy-water reactor. The West worries it could prove a source of plutonium for nuclear bombs once operational but Iran has offered to alter its configuration so that any plutonium output would be minimal and insignificant.
But diplomats say positions remain far apart on the issue of pivotal concern for the West: Iran’s capacity to refine uranium, which can be used to generate electricity but also, if processed to a high degree, provides material that detonates an atom bomb. (Reuters)
