Tehran, March 01: Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi reiterates that Tehran’s willingness to cooperate in the pursuit of its nuclear program requires a show of goodwill on the part of the West.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has persistently sought cooperation and interaction rather than confrontation and has remained prepared to collaborate within the internationally recognized norms and conventions, IRNA quoted Salehi as saying in a Monday meeting with European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
“However, this requires that the other side (the West) also demonstrates some signs of goodwill and cooperation,” Salehi further explained.
The Iranian top diplomat also emphasized that Iran’s nuclear activities are legal and transparent and that the Islamic Republic remains committed to its nuclear rights and obligations.
Ashton, for her part, said that the European Union is looking for ways to establish such cooperation and discourse.
“We should prepare the grounds for this,” she went on to say.
She further added that in order to create such cooperation, efforts should be made for normalization of the current situation.
While insisting on the legitimacy and transparency of Iran’s nuclear work, Salehi also made clear that the only trouble is that “the Westerners have entered into a process of reading minds.”
The Iranian minister then emphasized that you cannot measure legitimacy by predicting intent.
On Friday, the IAEA once again confirmed the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear energy program, reaffirming that the program has never been diverted to nuclear weapons production.
The US and its allies have accused Iran of intending to develop a military nuclear program, using it as a pretext to pressure the UN Security Council to impose a fourth round of sanctions against Iranian financial and military institutions in June 2010.
Iranian officials have fiercely refuted such charges, arguing that as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the IAEA, Tehran has the right to pursue and utilize peaceful nuclear technology.
——–Agencies