Araqchi: Talks on Contents Start, Enrichment Iran’s Redline

Iranian Deputy Foreign Seyed Abbas Araqchi announced that the Iranian team of negotiators and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton have started talks on the contents of a deal between Iran and the world powers, but meantime reiterated that uranium enrichment is Tehran’s redline in the negotiations.
“We have had almost three hours of intensive negotiations with Ms. Ashton and it was a highly fruitful discussion and we discussed the contents for the first time since yesterday,” Araqchi told reporters in Geneva on Thursday.

“There are certain serious differences which were discussed in this session, (yet) we haven’t reached the stage to discuss the text (of a deal) seriously,” he added.

Araqchi said chances are still there for a deal between Iran and the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, France and Britain plus Germany), and to this end “the other side is needed to shows the necessary flexibility and we can then reach an agreement on the text rapidly”.

He meantime underlined that “enrichment is our redline and will not be stopped at all”.

In relevant remarks today, Araqchi underlined that Tehran will not accept any agreement which ignores its right to enrich uranium.

“No agreement will be accepted in which enrichment doesn’t exist from the very beginning to the end,” he wrote on his Tweeter page.

Also on Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marziyeh Afkham strongly rejected some western media news reports alleging that Iran has halted a part of its nuclear enrichment activities, and reiterated that the activities of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) are proceeding on a normal track.

The western and Israeli media, including Reuters, CNN and the Jerusalem Post, reported that the six world powers want Iran to halt its most sensitive nuclear fuel-making work and take other measures as part of a confidence-building deal that would buy time for negotiations on a more far-reaching settlement of the decade-old dispute, adding that Iran has started complying with their demands and stopped part of its enrichment activities momentarily.

“The news reports released about the halt of our country’s nuclear activities are not true,” Afkham stressed during a weekly press briefing here in Tehran on Tuesday.

“As declared by the Atomic Energy Organization (of Iran), the nuclear programs are moving on their natural track according to the timetable and timeline,” Afkham said.

Afkham’s remarks came after Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Yukia Amano said in his recent report that Iran has stopped expanding its uranium enrichment capacity and has not started new centrifuges in the past three months

The quarterly report issued by the IAEA last week said that Iran has not begun operating any of its new generation IR-2M centrifuges, and installed “no…major components” at a reactor being built at Arak, AFP reported.

Iran has reiterated that stopping uranium enrichment remains an issue “beyond discussion”, and said it is only open to discuss the details of the enrichment process.