New Delhi, November 25
India is happy and relieved that the door has opened for the resumption of Iran-EU3 talks and no resolution was put up for voting before the Board of Governors’ meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at Vienna yesterday.
At the IAEA full-board meeting, India told the international atomic watchdog agency that it was for a consensual resolution of the Iran issue within the IAEA and also that it wanted the IAEA to scrupulously scrutinise the Pakistan-based A.Q. Khan network for coming to grips with challenges and risks of proliferation.
To Iran, India has conveyed two things. One, that Tehran’s demand for uranium enrichment as a matter of right being a NPT signatory is legitimate but how and where this enrichment is to be done is up to the negotiations between Iran and EU3 (UK, Germany and France). Iran has so far not agreed to the Russian initiative which envisages Iran outsourcing the uranium enrichment process
to Russia.
Secondly, India has told Iran that it wants a certain degree of flexibility to be shown by Tehran, but what kind of flexibility would again depend on negotiations which are expected to begin early December.
The next signpost on the contentious issue of Iran’s nuclear programme is the next IAEA Board meeting in March, 2006, though the USA and the EU3 have made it clear that they reserved the right to call a special board meeting before that.
India told the IAEA Board yesterday that it was reassuring to find in the IAEA Director-General’s recent report that in the period since the Board last met, Iran had been more forthcoming in providing the IAEA additional access to sites and individuals requested.
The IAEA DG’s report notes that the IAEA had been able to interview individuals involved in procurement who had not been previously made available to the agency in a host of areas. It refers to additional documents being made available to the agency in a number of areas and appreciates access being given to sites of interest.
India’s viewpoint is that the fact that new information had been made available to the agency which was being processed denoted substantive work in progress since the September meeting.
