Tehran, April 20: UN Security Council member Turkey stressed on Tuesday that diplomacy is the best way to resolve Iran’s nuclear issue and offered to help break a deadlock over an atomic fuel deal for Tehran.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, on a visit to Tehran, reiterated that Ankara, which has resisted a US push for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran, favoured negotiations to resolve the impasse.
The United States claims Iran’s nuclear programme is masking a drive for atomic weapons. Tehran says the programme is solely aimed at generating electricity to fuel its growing economy.
“The solution for Iran’s nuclear programme is through negotiations and diplomatic process,” Davutoglu said at a media conference in Tehran in remarks translated through an interpreter.
Turkey, one of the 15 UN Security Council members and a regional ally of Iran, “is ready to act as an intermediary in the issue of uranium exchange as a third country and hopes to have a fruitful role in this,” Davutoglu added.
“We will continue to try our best to see what we can do for this nuclear fuel swap.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who jointly addressed the press conference with Davutoglu, said Iran has been regularly consulting Turkey over its nuclear programme, but did not explicitly react to Ankara’s latest offer.
“Turkey will do its part if Iranians deem fit,” Davutoglu said in response.
The October 2009 deal envisaged Iran sending its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for conversion into high-grade 20 percent enriched uranium, to be returned later to Tehran as fuel for the medical research reactor.
But the deal stalled when Iran insisted that the exchange of the two materials happen simultaneously inside the country, a condition rejected by world powers.
Mottaki at the weekend said Tehran planned to talk to all the 15 members of the UN Security Council, including Washington, over the proposed fuel swap.
On Monday he went further and said he believed a deal was still possible.
“If the other side has serious political will for the fuel exchange formula, this can be a multi-lateral trust building opportunity, especially for the Islamic republic to trust the other side,” he said.
Washington, which has never ruled out a military strike against Iran, on Sunday expressed interest in reviving the fuel deal but said the UN-proposed offer needed to be “updated.”
“We’re still interested in pursuing that offer if Iran is interested,” US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said in Washington.
“At the heart of this was the proposal that Iran would ship out significant amounts of enriched fuel and there would be an exchange for a corresponding amount of fuel suitable for” the Tehran medical research reaction, he said, adding that “Iran has never agreed to that element of the offer.”
However, he said the deal would “need to be updated” as Iran has been operating centrifuges — the device that enriches uranium at supersonic speed — in the seven months since the offer was first made.
The initial offer was that Iran ship out 70 percent of its stock of LEU at that time to Russia and France. According to a February report of the UN nuclear watchdog, Iran has 2,065 kilogrammes of LEU.
—Agencies