By DPA
Tehran : Iran called on the West Sunday to be patient over the Islamic state’s ongoing nuclear dispute and stick to the agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as main basis for settling the issue.
“The current positive climate should not be distorted with sanction talks” but all sides should rather remain patient and allow the “normal process” to pursue, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini said in his weekly press briefing in Tehran.
The five permanent member states of the UN Security Council plus Germany Friday decided to delay a third Security Council resolution against Iran until they have evaluated an IAEA report due in by November.
Also Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki Saturday termed the Iran-IAEA agreement as the only framework for settling the ongoing dispute over Iran’s nuclear programmes.
The veto powers pledged to wait for the results of negotiations between European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani.
Iran and the IAEA agreed last month on a plan of action, which aims to remove all technical ambiguities by the IAEA over Iran’s nuclear projects and at the same time prepare grounds for political talks between Larijani and Solana.
Iranian spokesman Hosseini further rejected Western disapproval of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks at the UN General Assembly that the political aspects of the Iranian nuclear dossier should be considered as closed.
Hosseini said the president’s announcement was not new but already made in Tehran (during a press conference last Aug) and stressed that considering Iran’s cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog, the remaining technical issues should indeed be dealt with by the IAEA only.
The spokesman added that Iran would continue its diplomatic efforts to settle the dispute and closely cooperate with the IAEA.
According to the Iran-IAEA plan, first the technical aspects should be clarified through IAEA inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites by November or December and political aspects should be discussed between Larijani and Solana after the finalization of the IAEA report.
Ahmadinejad once again stressed in New York that Iran would continue enriching uranium but noted that enrichment would not exceed the 5-per-cent level.
Uranium enriched at the 5-per-cent level could only be used, as claimed by Tehran, to produce nuclear fuel but the same process at a higher enrichment level could be used, as feared by the West, to make atomic bombs.