Excerpts from previous status reports, by subject
Removed on August 5, 2005
Ahmadinejad’s victory
The conservative mayor of Tehran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swept to victory
in the second round of Iran’s presidential election on June
24, 2005, beating out former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Ahmadinejad, who received 17.2 million votes compared with just over
10 million for Rafsanjani, focused his campaign on improving economic
conditions for ordinary Iranians and on ending corruption. On negotiations
with Europe over Iran’s nuclear program, Ahmadinejad has promised
to continue the talks “while considering national interests
and the absolute rights of the Iranian nation.” From his statements
both before and after the election, it seems unlikely that Ahmadinejad
will easily renounce Iran’s plans to enrich uranium, which
has been Europe’s goal in its negotiations with Iran. For its
part, Europe’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana said that
there would be no change in the European negotiating position in
response to Ahmadinejad’s victory. However, the Europeans had
hoped to deal with Rafsanjani, who voiced a more conciliatory approach
to Europe and the United States during his campaign.
The IAEA Board
meets in June 2005
Iran’s nuclear program was again the subject of heated debate
at a June 2005 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s
governing board. The board learned that Tehran lied about when it last
experimented with plutonium, that Tehran is still hindering inspectors’ investigation
of two sites that may be linked to weapon efforts, and that it has
yet to provide key documents on the procurement of gas centrifuge parts
and other nuclear equipment from the smuggling network run by Pakistani
scientist A.Q. Khan. In his opening statement at the board meeting,
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei called on Iran to “provide
detailed information” on its centrifuge enrichment program, to
open the Parchin military complex to further inspection and to explain
what was done at the suspect site of Lavizan Shian as well as what
dual-use equipment was procured for the site.
Developments in talks
between Iran and Europe
A breakthrough in Iran-EU talks came on May 25, 2005, when the foreign
ministers of Britain, France and Germany convinced Iran to maintain
its freeze on uranium enrichment through early August. In exchange,
the Europeans said they would refrain from pushing the IAEA governing
board to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for deceiving international
inspectors.
But Tehran’s commitment to the suspension remains temporary. Last March, Iran tabled a proposal in which it would have been allowed to resume uranium processing by July 2005, to assemble, install and test 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz, to run the centrifuges to enrich uranium under surveillance by the IAEA, and to fabricate the enriched uranium into reactor fuel rods. This proposal is light years away from what the Europeans have said they would accept. The number of centrifuges Iran sought to operate—3,000—is highly suspicious. It is three times as many as Iran initially planned to install at its pilot plant at Natanz, and far more than would be needed for laboratory-scale research. Nor would 3,000 centrifuges produce enough low-enriched uranium to fuel Iran’s nuclear power reactor at Bushehr. They would, however, be ideal for enriching enough uranium for a small nuclear arsenal.
The United States decides to back Europe
In March 2005, the United States took a big step and explicitly endorsed
Europe’s negotiating strategy with Iran. U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said that Europe and the United States shared a “common
view” on how to deal with Iran and that, in an effort to support
the E.U.’s diplomacy, the United States would no longer block
Iran’s application to join the World Trade Organization or its
attempts to buy spare parts for its civilian aircraft. After years
of waiting, Iran’s candidacy to the W.T.O. was officially accepted
on May 26, and accession negotiations—a process that can take
years—have begun.