IRAN and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, failed to clinch a long-sought deal on Sunday on Tehran’s nuclear programme despite marathon talks in Geneva.
However, they expressed optimism about a deal and agreed to meet there again on November 20.
In Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pleaded for parliament’s backing in the negotiations while insisting that Iran would not abandon its nuclear rights, including uranium enrichment.
Diplomats said significant progress had been made in three days of intense negotiations aimed at reaching agreement in the decade-long standoff.
Hopes had soared for an impending deal after top world diplomats rushed to Geneva to join the talks, but faded after cracks began to show among world powers when France raised concerns.
Emerging in the early hours of Sunday from a last-ditch negotiating session, EU diplomatic chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the two sides had not been able to come together on a deal.
‘A lot of concrete progress has been achieved but some issues remain,’ Ashton said. ‘Our objective is to reach a conclusion and that’s what we’ll come back to try to do.’
Zarif said he was not discouraged by the failure of the talks, saying the meetings had taken place in a positive atmosphere and that he hoped to reach an agreement at the next talks.
‘I’m not disappointed at all,’ Zarif said. ‘We are all on the same wavelength and that’s important . . . Actually I think we had a very good, productive three days and it’s something we can build on to move forward,’ he added.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was the first to reveal that the deal had failed, pre-empting the official announcement after the talks broke up.
Fabius had earlier raised concerns that the proposal did not go far enough to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
‘The meetings in Geneva have made it possible to move forward, but we have not yet managed to conclude, because there are still some questions remaining to be dealt with,’ Fabius said.
He insisted that France wanted an agreement, despite claims from some officials that Paris had stymied efforts to reach a deal.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, who had cut short a Middle East tour to join the talks, said ‘significant progress’ had been made.
‘There’s no question in my mind that we are closer now as we leave Geneva,’ he said, adding that Washington remained intent on ensuring that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.
‘We came to Geneva determined to make certain that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon. That remains our goal,’ Kerry said.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said an agreement over the issues regarding Iran’s nuclear energy programme is ‘on the table’ and it can be achieved within a few weeks.
‘On the question of will it happen in the next few weeks, there is a good chance of that,’ Hague said in a Sunday interview with the BBC.
‘A deal is on the table and it can be done. But it is a formidably difficult negotiation, I can’t say exactly when it will conclude,’ he added.
The closed-door talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Britain, Russia, China, France and the US, plus Germany, began in Geneva, Switzerland, on Thursday and ended on Sunday.
In a final joint press conference with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said progress was made during the ‘productive’ talks and that the two sides had reached an agreement on a number of issues.
Ashton, for her part, also said that the two sides had made ‘concrete progress’ in the talks, which she described as ‘intense and constructive,’ adding that the next round of the talks would be held on November 20.
The draft deal said to be on the table could have seen Iran freeze parts of its nuclear programme in exchange for the easing of some of the sanctions that have battered its economy.
The world powers in the talks suspect Iran’s programme is aimed at developing nuclear weapons, despite Tehran’s repeated denials.
Rouhani – whose election is widely credited with kickstarting the nuclear talks – earlier urged world powers to seize what he called ‘an exceptional opportunity’ for a deal.
Reports said the proposed deal could have seen Iran stop enriching uranium to 20 per cent, which is just a few technical steps from weapons-grade, reduce existing stockpiles and agree not to activate its plutonium reactor at Arak.
Global powers would have in exchange taken limited and ‘reversible’ measures to ease sanctions, such as unfreezing some Iranian funds in foreign accounts.
Negotiators would then have had time to work out a more comprehensive deal that Iran has said it hopes could be in place within a year.
Rouhani told the conservative-dominated parliament in remarks quoted Sunday by the ISNA news agency that Iran would not cross any ‘red lines’ and would retain its international right to ‘enrichment on Iranian soil’.
Rouhani pleaded for parliament’s backing.
‘If we want to succeed in these negotiations, we need the support of the supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) and of lawmakers,’ he told them.
The possible agreement had already come under fire from Tehran’s arch-foe Israel, widely thought to be the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear armed power, which has opposed any move to ease sanctions.
Israeli Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said on Sunday his government would lobby the US Congress to prevent an agreement being reached – one Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called a ‘very bad deal’.
After years of fruitless efforts, talks over Iran’s atomic activities were given new momentum by the election of Rouhani, seen as a relative moderate, in June.
Iran is anxious for relief from crippling US and European Union economic sanctions that have cut oil revenues by more than half, caused the value of its currency to plunge and pushed inflation above 40 per cent.
France has been behind the failure by the six countries involved in nuclear negotiations with Iran to reach a possible agreement with the Islamic Republic over its nuclear energy programme, a Western diplomat close to the negotiations implies.
‘The Americans, the EU and the Iranians have been working intensively together for months on this proposal, and this is nothing more than an attempt by (French Foreign Minister Laurent)Fabius to insert himself into relevance late in the negotiations,’ said the Western diplomat.
The comments seem in retrospect to have been foreshadowed by remarks made by Fabius himself, who said in a radio interview in Geneva early on Saturday at the beginning of the third day of the nuclear talks that ‘Israel’s concerns’ must be taken into consideration in the course of the nuclear negotiations.
‘It is necessary to take fully into account Israel’s security concerns and those of the region,’ he said.
Fabius also noted that there is ‘no certainty’ whether Iran and six major world powers will reach an agreement at the current stage of their nuclear negotiations and said that there were many questions that still needed to be settled.
The comments by the French foreign minister came amid Israel’s deep anger over the likelihood of an agreement between Iran and the six world powers in the course of the nuclear talks.
Later on Saturday, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said that he ‘draws encouragement from the fact that there are other partners to Israel’s concerns about the agreement shaping up,’ hinting at the French foreign minister.
On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ‘utterly’ denounced a possible agreement in the nuclear talks as ‘very, very bad’.
