Sunday 22 March 2015

Khamenei throws support behind nuclear deal

Iran’s supreme leader and ultimate decision maker, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted on Saturday that there would be no nuclear deal with major powers unless they brought an immediate end to sanctions and allowed the country’s nuclear programme to progress.

Speaking in the holy city of Mashhad on Norouz, the Iranian new year, the ayatollah threw his support behind a nuclear dealsaying no one in Iran opposed a diplomatic solution to the decade-long nuclear stand-off. But he called on the major powers to make more compromises.

“Americans tell us: ‘We sign an agreement and then look into how you behave.’ This is wrong and unacceptable,” he said.

“Lifting of sanctions is part of the negotiations and not the [future] outcome of negotiations . . . which should happen without any gap after reaching an agreement.”

Talks between Iran and the six powers — US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany — on limiting Iran’s nuclear programme broke off in Lausanne on Friday after the two sides said good progress had been made but important issues remained unresolved.

Big obstacles are believed to include disagreement over limits on research and development into new types of centrifuges for enriching uranium, and how quickly sanctions against Iran would be lifted by the UN Security Council, the US and the EU.

Negotiators will return to Switzerland on Wednesday or Thursday to meet a March 31 deadline for reaching broad consensus that could lead to a comprehensive deal by July.

The ayatollah insisted, once again, that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons and that since the interim nuclear agreement reached in November 2013 it had not violated its commitments in line with “Islamic political ethics”.

“This is a popular and local industry which should continue to make progress,” he said.

He accused the US of breaking promises and cheating and said Iran’s intellectual community should learn from the nuclear talks that the US could not be trusted and remained Iran’s enemy because it was the “root cause” of all problems Iran faced.

“These talks . . . are only on the nuclear programme and nothing else,” he said, in comments intended to allay the concerns of Iranian hardliners who are worried a nuclear accord will lead to normalisation of ties with Washington. “We have no talks at all with the US on regional and domestic issues and weapons.”

Iran’s political forces are locked in a power struggle ahead of parliamentary elections next year. Hassan Rouhani’s centrist government is under pressure from hardliners intent on preventing the president’s moderate supporters from taking over the legislative body. However, the hardliners are being curbed by Ayatollah Khamenei in an effort to prevent them sabotaging the nuclear talks.

Ayatollah Khamenei threw his strongest support so far behind President Rouhani and urged everyone “even those who did not vote for him” to back economic reforms. He said this did not mean he was giving anyone “a blank cheque”, but warned that the country faced major challenges.

The US, he said, wanted to disrupt Iran’s “unique” security in the region by imposing sanctions and fan people’s unhappiness with their economic situation so that people revolt against the Islamic regime. “The enemy’s only weapon is sanctions,” he said. “People should try to use domestically-made goods and support Iranian labourers and help boost domestic industries.”

- FT.com




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