Doug Lorimer
Iran's January 9 decision to reopen its uranium enrichment research facilities after a voluntary year-long suspension has been seized on by the US and its European Union allies to push for Iran to be referred by the UN's Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors to the UN Security Council for possible punitive "action".
Iran is a signatory to the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allows it to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. However, since early 2002, when US President George Bush declared Iran, Iraq and North Korea an "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world", US officials have alleged that Iran's nuclear power program is a cover for a secret program to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
Despite go-anywhere, see-anything inspections by the IAEA finding no evidence to support the US allegations, Washington has been pushing for the 35-member IAEA board to refer Iran to the Security Council. This would enable Washington to claim that the IAEA backs its allegations that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to "international peace and security". It would help lay the diplomatic and propaganda groundwork for a future Iraq-style US invasion and occupation of Iran, and to sell off its nationalised oil industry to US oil corporations. Iran is the world's fourth-largest oil exporter.
In November 2004, Iran agreed to suspend its nuclear fuel cycle research activities while it negotiated with the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) on a mutually acceptable agreement that would "provide objective guarantees" to the EU-3 that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes. In exchange, the EU-3 held out the promise of Iran being able to access the EU's advanced nuclear power industry technology.
The negotiations broke down last August when the EU-3 submitted a proposal to Iran that explicitly required Iran "not to pursue fuel-cycle activities". This proposal was rejected by Tehran since it violated its right under the NPT and Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA, signed in 1974, to develop a commercial nuclear fuel production industry.
Last September, under extreme US pressure, the IAEA board "urged" Iran to accept the EU-3 proposal and not to resume its nuclear fuel cycle research.
On January 12, the foreign ministers of the EU-3 and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana issued a joint statement declaring that the "time has now come for the Security Council to become involved".
That same day, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Washington: "We agree that the Iranian regime's defiant resumption of uranium-enrichment work leaves the EU with no choice but to request an emergency meeting of the IAEA board of governors."
The next day, John Bolton, Washington's ambassador to the UN, declared in Berlin that Iran was a "threat to international peace", citing as supposed evidence the remarks that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made to an Islamic students' conference held in Tehran last October, which were widely reported by the Western corporate media as a call for Israel to "be wiped off the map".
In fact, Ahmadinejad had told the conference that the Israeli "occupying regime must be wiped off the map", to which he added: "The issue of Palestine is not over at all. It will be over the day a Palestinian government, which belongs to the Palestinian people, comes to power; the day that all refugees return to their homes; a democratic government elected by the people comes to power. Of course those who have come from far away to plunder this land have no right to choose for this nation."
The misreporting by the Western media of public comments made by Ahmadinejad to fit in with Washington's attempts to portray his regime as a threat to "international peace" was carried a step further by CNN on January 14. It reported that the Iranian president had declared that his country had "a right to nuclear weapons", when he had actually said it had "a right to nuclear technology".
Following Iran's reopening of its nuclear fuel cycle research facilities, Washington and the EU-3 sought to persuade China and Russia to back their push to have the IAEA refer Iran to the Security Council. After talks were held in London by diplomats from the six countries, on January 16 the foreign ministers of the EU-3 called for an emergency IAEA board meeting to be held on February 2-3.
CNN reported on January 17 that IAEA spokesperson Tracy Brown said any country or countries could call for a meeting of the agency's 35-member board, but that did not guarantee a meeting. The board members would make a decision on whether to hold the meeting, depending on various criteria, including the subject and "the urgency".
Associated Press reported on January 17 that the "meeting in London produced no agreement among the United States, France, Britain and Germany and Moscow and Beijing on whether to refer the dispute over Iranian nuclear enrichment to the Security Council".
While there has been much Western media speculation that such a referral would lead to UN economic sanctions being imposed on Iran, this is opposed by Moscow and Beijing — which each hold a veto power on the Security Council. China gets 12% of its oil imports from Iran, while Russia has a US$800 million contract to build Iran's first nuclear power plant, which will become operational by the end of this year, and hopes to win contracts from Tehran to build six more nuclear power plants.
Reuters reported on January 17 that EU diplomats at the UN's headquarters in New York had privately disclosed that if the IAEA board does refer Iran to the Security Council, Britain would propose that the UN body issue a statement urging Iran to "extend full and prompt cooperation to the" IAEA (which Iran is already doing) by agreeing to as yet unspecified "additional transparency measures".
From Green Left Weekly, January 25, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.