Iran’s overtures fail to convince EU

Photographers waited in vain this week for Ali-Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, outside the entrance to a state-organised conference designed to help improve the Islamic regime’s relations with the European Union.

After half an hour, organisers finally announced that Mr Salehi was “sick”and unable to attend the two-day event that ended on Tuesday.

Inside the hall, there were no European ambassadors even though they were all invited, fuelling suspicion that this was the real reason why Iran’s top diplomat failed to show up. Instead he sent the text of his speech to be read out to assembled foreign ministry officials, academics, businesspeople and some diplomats.

The cold shoulder by Europe’s envoys was a sign that Iran’s bid to improve ties with the region is viewed as too little too late at a time when Tehran is facing mounting international pressure and sanctions over its nuclear programme, alleged human rights violations and terrorism charges.

“We want to eliminate the existing hurdles in [Iran’s] relations with the European Union,” Mr Salehi’s statement read. “We hope Iran’s relations with Europe will be normalised gradually, for which we need constant consultations and patience.”

In 1997, the EU withdrew all its ambassadors to Tehran for more than six months and halted its policy of “critical dialogue” over Iran’s alleged terror attack against a Kurdish dissident in Berlin.

Now Iran has full diplomatic relations with almost all European states, but the 27-member bloc has recently increased political and economic pressure to levels not seen in Tehran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The EU has supported four rounds of sanctions against Iran at the UN over the past three years over the country’s nuclear programme. The EU has also imposed unilateral punitive measures against Iran since 2008, including visa bans on senior officials and military commanders. It has also frozen the assets of individuals and entities, and enforced economic and banking sanctions.

The scope of Europe’s disagreement with Iran has recently expanded beyond the country’s controversial nuclear programme to human rights issues and Iran’s alleged participation in a plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

“Iran is under an unprecedented level of international pressure and is trying to ease it,” said a university lecturer of international relations at the conference. “But one should not forget that the government of [Mahmoud] Ahmadi-Nejad is also trying to gain popularity at home through improving relations with western states.”

The Iranian public would like to see improved relations with the US and Europe, and Mr Salehi said in his statement that the Iranian nation had “never” had any problems with European states.

He insisted that negotiations were the only way to remove “wrong perceptions”, and that future talks could include human rights as well as other fields of mutual concern such as Iran’s influence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinians and the prevention of drug trafficking, organised crime and terrorism.

Responding to an offer by Iran to resume talks on its nuclear programme, Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief, said talks between Iran and the US, Britain, France, Germany, as well as China and Russia, could resume within weeks if Iran was ready to discuss confidence-building measures without conditions.

The last round of talks in January made no progress as Iran continued to insist that enriching uranium was its right and that it had no intention of diverting its “peaceful” nuclear activities into a weapons programme.

European leaders at a Brussels summit on Sunday warned that Iran would face tougher sanctions if it failed to address international concerns about its nuclear programme. They urged Iran to engage in “constructive and substantial talks” to avoid “possible future restrictive measures”.

Iranian observers doubt that Tehran is ready to compromise over its nuclear programme by halting uranium enrichment, but suggest that it could try to improve its image and release some political prisoners.

Source: The Financial Times