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China supports Barack Obama’s call for new Iran sanctions

01 April 2010 02:55 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. New sanctions on Iran came a significant step closer today, when China agreed to begin drafting a UN resolution imposing measures aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear programme, APA reports citing Guardian.co.uk web-page.
According to officials with knowledge of the talks, an agreement to begin drafting a new security council resolution was reached in a telephone call involving representatives from the five permanent council members â€“ the US, China, Russia, Britain and France â€“ and Germany.
The negotiations will now move to New York, where diplomats will hammer out a sanctions package. Barack Obama said yesterday he hoped the UN would pass a sanctions resolution quickly.
"My hope is that we are going to get this done this spring. I’m not interested in waiting months for a sanctions regime to be in place. I’m interested in seeing that regime in weeks," the president said during a joint White House appearance with his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Obama said the long-term consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran were unacceptable and that Tehran had so far rejected diplomatic entreaties. But he added: "The door remains open if the Iranians choose to walk through it."
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insists its nuclear industry is for peaceful power generation.
Negotiations over sanctions have taken months in the past and although Obama says he would like a deal done this spring, they are likely to be protracted again. Both China and Russia want a much narrower set of measures than the Americans and western Europeans have been seeking.
Following the revelation last September that Tehran had been building a covert uranium enrichment plant near Qom, and the collapse of a compromise deal by which Iran would export the bulk of its enriched uranium stockpile for processing, Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, had agreed the need for new sanctions.
But until today, Beijing had held out against US-led pressure to begin drafting a resolution. The talks were complicated by other flashpoints in US-China relations, particularly American arms sales to Taiwan in January and Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in February.
Bringing China to the negotiating table will be seen in Washington as a diplomatic breakthrough, but the degree of Obama’s success in winning the argument will be measured by the final terms of the UN resolution, and on how long it takes to agree.
China is in the process of changing its delegation at the UN, a move that could delay negotiations further. Some officials said they expected the security council talks to drag on to June.
The US had originally sought broad sanctions against Iran’s energy sector. Russia and China have insisted that the measures are targeted against individuals and institutions directly linked with Iran’s nuclear and missile programme.
The news of diplomatic progress towards sanctions coincided with a report that an Iranian nuclear scientist who went missing in Saudi Arabia last summer had been persuaded to defect by the CIA and had been resettled in the US. ABC News said the defection of Shahram Amiri, was part of a "long-planned" CIA operation.
"The CIA reportedly approached the scientist in Iran through an intermediary who made an offer of resettlement on behalf of the United States," the US broadcaster said.
It echoed earlier speculation that Amiri, an expert on radioactive isotopes at Malek Ashtar University in Tehran, had been persuaded to defect while on a pilgrimage to Mecca late last May or early June.
"Defectors are the most effective tool you have, and the time when you can get to them is when they come on the Haj," said Robert Baer, a former CIA agent in the Middle East. "The Saudis have an incentive to monitor these people and pass the names on. It used to be conferences where these people were approached but Tehran caught on that these were fishing expeditions.
"Now when [scientists and officials] go abroad they are closely watched. They come in pairs and they eat dinner together. The exception is going on the Haj."
If confirmed, Amiri’s defection would mark an important achievement for a CIA programme â€“ known as Operation Brain Drain â€“ aimed at bleeding the Iranian nuclear programme of talent and at the same time gathering intelligence on its progress.