Iran Nuclear Talks End with No Agreement
By Leon Malherbe and Paul Carrel
PARIS (Reuters) - Talks between Iran and three European Union heavyweights ended on Saturday without an agreement on Tehran's nuclear program, a source close to the negotiations said.
Iran was seeking a compromise in the talks with France, Germany and Britain to avoid a dispute over its nuclear program being referred to the United Nations Security Council and avert the risk of sanctions.
The EU trio wants Iran to stop enriching uranium.
"At the end of difficult talks, the two parties made considerable progress toward a provisional agreement on a common approach on these issues," the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
But a source close to the negotiations said: "Nothing is settled ... The discussions were difficult, very difficult. The Iranians struggled hard."
"Everyone has to touch base now," the source added after the second day of talks. "That's the end of this meeting ... There is no (further) meeting planned."
Iran denies U.S. accusations that it is developing nuclear weapons. It says uranium enrichment, a process of purifying uranium for use as fuel in atomic power plants or in weapons, is a sovereign right that it will never abandon.
Its official IRNA news agency said lawmakers had drafted a bill, to go to parliament next week, outlawing the state from developing nuclear weapons in a bid to show the world that Tehran's atomic ambitions were entirely peaceful.
"Parliament intends to make it a law ... that Iran does not need atomic arms, to prove to the world that the U.S. and Israel are lying," lawmaker Hamid Reza Hajbabaei was quoted as saying.
At the talks Tehran was offering a six-month suspension of its enrichment program but Britain, France and Germany wanted it to agree to an indefinite suspension before an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting on Nov. 25, diplomats said.
If no deal is struck before the meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog's board of governors, the EU is expected to support Washington's demand for a referral to the U.N. Security Council.
CHINA OPPOSES SECURITY COUNCIL REFERRAL
China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said during a visit to Iran on Saturday that it would be better if the matter were not referred to the Security Council, where Beijing holds the option of vetoing any sanctions against Tehran.
"It would only make the issue more complicated and difficult to work out," he told a news conference.
Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi added: "It is in the interests of both sides that the issue be resolved in a way that Iran retains its legitimate right to use peaceful nuclear technology and others are assured that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons."
An Iranian negotiator in Paris said a key issue was Tehran's demand for the IAEA's board of governors to stop considering it a case for special investigation. Any suspension of Iran's enrichment program would have to be "linked to the normalization of the IAEA process in Iran," he said.
Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot said at an EU foreign ministers' meeting on Friday that Europe wanted full suspension of all uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing activities.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all state matters, said on Friday Iran had no intention of producing atomic weapons.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has encouraged Iran to reach a deal and offered to guarantee its supply of nuclear fuel if it abandons its fuel production capabilities, diplomats said.
(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in London and Paul Hughes and Amir Paivar in Tehran)