AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
TEHRAN: Iran was talking tough on Wednesday as a crucial meeting with the European Union opens on its nuclear activities opened, insisting on its right to enrich uranium on its own soil.
“From Iran's point of view the subject of the talks is to remove the suspension of the uranium processing facilities and this must happen within a clear timetable,” Hossein Entezami, spokesman for Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told state radio.
The comments emerging from Tehran do not bode well for the talks being held in Vienna which will examine the possibility of resuming long-term negotiations aimed at winning guarantees Iran will not acquire the bomb.
Failure could spark a push by the Europeans and United States for the issue to be sent to the UN Security Council.
The talks are the first contact between the two sides since negotiations broke off in August, when Iran resumed uranium conversion at its Isfahan facility.
Conversion is the first step in making enriched uranium that can both be nuclear reactor fuel or the explosive core of nuclear weapons.
Iran insists it has a right to enrich uranium on its territory and it has rejected a Russian idea to do some fuel cycle at home while enriching uranium only on Russian soil — thus keeping the most sensitive nuclear work out of the country.
“It is normal when we talk about enrichment for manufacturing nuclear fuel, it means having enrichment and the nuclear fuel cycle on our own territory,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters.
He said the talks would focus on: “The non-deviation of Iran's nuclear activities towards military aims and guarantees from the other side to accept Iran's right to master the civil nuclear technology”.
Mottaki was uncompromising over the issue of enrichment, which Iran insists it has a right to do under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“Those who tell us that Iran should not master enrichment technology have not understood that our young engineers have already mastered this technology which is now domestic,” he said.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has suggested that foreign firms could be involved in enrichment on Iranian soil as a form of supervision.
“We welcome any proposals that guarantee Iran's rights, that is, enrichment must be carried out on Iranian soil by Iranian technicians,” Entezami said.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment activities in October 2003.
The West argues that Iran cannot be trusted to carry out enrichment since this process gives nations a “break-out capacity” to make nuclear weapons.
Tehran also made clear it will not stop uranium conversion, a process for making uranium hexafluoride, which is injected into centrifuges for enrichment.
Defending the resumption of this process, which triggered the collapse of the talks in August, Mottaki said: “Isfahan is a done deal. It has been a long time since the UCF (uranium conversion facility) has started”.
“Considering the Isfahan facility was reopened before the November meeting the negotiations should start from that point on,” said Entezami for his part.
In November the International Atomic Energy Agency put off referring Iran to the Security Council, instead calling on Tehran to heed the resolution adopted by the board of governors in September that demands Iran to suspend all enrichment related activities.
