MOSCOW, March 19, (Agencies): US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her Russian counterpart have clashed openly over the planned startup this summer of Iran’s first, Russian-built nuclear power plant, highlighting a split in views over how to steer Iran away from nuclear weapons.
Clinton did not criticize the long-delayed project directly but said Thursday that the Obama administration is opposed to the timing of the nuclear plant’s startup. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced the summer startup plans that day, shortly after Clinton arrived for a two-day visit.
The nuclear plant is an example of Russian-Iranian economic ties and technical cooperation, on terms that have long made the United States uncomfortable. It was a background issue during a difficult period in US-Russian relations last year and in the ongoing US-led effort to bring new United Nations economic penalties against Iran over suspicions that part of its nuclear program is aimed at building a bomb.
Putin’s announcement adds another complication to the already long list of issues on which Clinton and her Russian hosts don’t agree. Clinton is seeing Putin on Friday.
At a news conference with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov after talks on a wide range of issues, Clinton told reporters that Iran, while entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, must reassure the world that it is not trying to build a nuclear weapon.
“In the absence of those reassurances, we think it would be premature to go forward with any project at this time, because we want to send an unequivocal message to the Iranians,” she said.
Lavrov forcefully asserted that, whatever the US concerns, his country will finish its work on the Bushehr nuclear power plant shortly.
“The project will be completed,” Lavrov said. “We are now in the final stage, and this nuclear power plant will be launched. It will be put into operation, it will be functioning, producing power.” He added that the plant will operate under strict compliance with requirements of the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency.
Lavrov and Clinton also asserted to reporters that US-Russian negotiations on a new treaty to reduce long-range nuclear weapons are close to completion. The accord would replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expired in December.
Lavrov said the two sides now are discussing the time and place for President Barack Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev to sign the new deal, which also must be ratified by each country’s legislature.
“We are now at the finish line,” Lavrov said.
Clinton was a bit more circumspect.
“We have a saying in the United States: ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,”’ she said. “And that means that we are beginning our discussions about where and when our two presidents will sign the START agreement. But we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. First, our negotiators have to sign on the dotted line, so to speak.”
A Clinton spokesman, P.J. Crowley, said later that the negotiators were “down to one or two issues” before completing the deal.
The Obama administration has been unsuccessful in pressing Iran to take steps to reassure the world of its nuclear intentions and has pointed to its secret construction of a uranium enrichment plant - disclosed by the West last fall - as evidence that Iran’s intentions are not purely peaceful.
Clinton suggested that by endorsing Iran’s startup of its Bushehr power plant, Tehran would get the mistaken impression that the rest of the world accepted its claim that it wants nuclear power only for electricity generation and not to secretly produce nuclear bombs.
Crowley said Clinton’s comment was not intended as criticism of Russia’s involvement in the Bushehr project, which has been decades in the making.
Russia agrees that Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons, but it has close commercial ties with Tehran and has used its position as a veto-wielding permanent UN Security Council member to water down Western-backed sanctions. Lavrov said he and Clinton discussed the prospect of a new UN sanctions resolution, but he made clear that Moscow does not see new sanctions as inevitable.
“As for sanctions that might be discussed in the United Nations Security Council, that discussion has not begun yet,” Lavrov said.
Asked what Russia was doing to nudge China - which also has veto power in the Security Council - toward accepting the idea of new sanctions against Iran, Lavrov indicated that China has demonstrated that it is willing to live up to its obligations as a nuclear power.
He said China, like the US, Russia and other nuclear weapons states, has “a special commitment and obligation” to ensure that nuclear weapons technology does not spread around the world. “Our Chinese partners have never given us any grounds to suspect them of insufficient attention to nonproliferation issues,” he said.
Dialogue
Meanwhile, Russia warned Iran it was missing out on a chance to start a broad dialogue, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again sought to win the Kremlin’s assent for tougher stance on Tehran.
Iran’s defiance over its nuclear programme means the country is wasting a chance for talks to find a solution, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said alongside Clinton after her talks with President Dmitry Medvedev.
“It is letting an opportunity to establish dialogue with the international community slip away,” Lavrov said.
The top diplomats addressed reporters just before Clinton’s talks with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, believed to have a final say on all issues related to Iran.
Lavrov’s comments were the latest indication of Russian frustration that Iran has failed to agree a deal with the international community to end the standoff over its nuclear programme.
Lavrov however reiterated Russia’s traditional stance that sanctions against Tehran could be inevitable but did not make any public promises beyond that.
Lavrov said Medvedev told Clinton during her second and final day in Moscow that the sanctions against Iran should be “smart, non-aggressive and non-paralysing.”
“As Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, sanctions rarely work but there may appear a situation when they may end up being inevitable,” Lavrov told reporters.
“And we don’t rule out that such a situation may appear with respect to Iran.”
Perseverance
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi vowed a “year of perseverance” in his fight against the government, in an Internet message on Friday marking the Persian new year.
Mousavi, who remains steadfast in rejecting the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June last year, said a “retreat would be treason to Islam, the nation and to the blood of the martyrs.”
“We will face issues and problems in (the Iranian year to March 2011). Part of it goes back to the demand of the people after the election which is a rightful demand,” Mousavi said in a statement posted on his website.
“These demands will continue and the new year will be the year of perseverance for this rightful and legal demand,” Mousavi said on his website Kaleme.com.
Once seen as a pillar of the Islamic regime, former premier Mousavi is now a bitter critic of the country’s hardline leadership along with fellow opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi.
Iran witnessed one of its worst political crisis when Mousavi, Karroubi and hundreds of thousands of their supporters took to the streets after Ahmadinejad’s re-election, protesting that the poll was massively rigged.
The Persian New Year, or Nowrouz, starts on March 21 and marks the arrival of spring.
Former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, a strong supporter of the opposition movement, called for electoral changes and the release of political prisoners.
“We should learn our lesson from past events and choose a different path,” the website Parlemannews.ir quoted Khatami as saying at talks with a group of reformists.
“Several issues can be solved if prisoners are freed, political movements enjoy legal freedom, criticism is allowed within legal boundaries (and) the ground is prepared for healthy and free elections.”
Mousavi, meanwhile, lashed out at the government’s handling of the inflation-hit economy, predicting the year ahead would see unemployment and poverty mount as investment falls.
“The adventurist policies which lack wisdom have created a threatening situation for us,” the opposition leader said.
Convicted
A former Iranian vice president and prominent reform activist convicted of spreading propaganda against the ruling clerical establishment has begun a one-year prison sentence, a close relative said Friday.
An appeals court upheld Hossein Marashi’s conviction and sentence on Wednesday, one of many court rulings against activists and opposition figures rounded up in the turmoil triggered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in June.
The prosecutions have dealt a major blow to a protest movement that was already hard to sustain with security forces delivering a punishing response at each attempt to rally support on the streets.
Activist
Meanwhile, Iranian opposition activist Amir Jahanchachi unveiled a new project on Friday to provide financial and logistical support to movements opposing the Islamic republic’s hardline regime.
The scheme, dubbed the “Green Wave”, aimed to create organised “cells of resistance” to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Jahanchachi told AFP in London, where he lives.
“At the present time, the (opposition) green movement on the streets... is not structured, does not have a clear direction, and above all has no leadership to clinch victory,” said the businessman and writer, 49.
“What I want to do and what we are going to do, is transform cells of discontent... into cells of resistance,” he added.
Opposition groups “will contact us and if they need something for concrete projects, we will help them,” he said, adding he had resources for those seeking to topple the Iranian regime.
Specific plans included organising long strikes in sectors such as transport to “bring this regime to its knees,” said Jahanchachi, whose father was the country’s last finance minister under the shah.
Action
The European Union plans to take action against Iran for its jamming of European satellite broadcasts, according to a draft statement by EU foreign ministers ahead of a meeting on Monday.
The statement, obtained by Reuters, follows talks among EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and the foreign ministers of Britain, Germany and France on the jamming of programmes broadcast to Iran by the BBC, Deutsche Welle and other media.
“The EU calls on the Iranian authorities to stop the jamming of satellite broadcasting and Internet censorship and to put an end to this electronic interference immediately,” the statement prepared for Monday’s meeting in Brussels says.
“The EU is determined to pursue these issues and to act with a view to put an end to this unacceptable situation.”
It is not clear what measures the EU could take, but French newspaper Le Figaro reported this week it could involve blocking the export of equipment made by companies such as Siemens and Nokia that makes it possible to intercept email and mobile phone conversations.
It could also involve Eutelsat, a French satellite operator that has been widely affected by Iran’s jamming, blocking the transmission of Iranian broadcasts abroad, including those of Press TV in Britain, Le Figaro said.