Turkey is awaiting Iran’s response to an offer to store Tehran’s enriched uranium stockpile, but the proposal faces opposition in the Islamic Republic, Turkey’s foreign minister was quoted as saying yesterday.
“The Iranians trust us... but there is a great opposition within Iran. They say the problem is not Turkey, but the fact that the uranium will be taken abroad,” the mass-selling Hurriyet daily quoted Ahmet Davutoglu as saying. “From our point of view, the door is open. We will store [the uranium] as a kind of a trustee,” he told reporters accompanying him on a trip to Spain.
The proposal is part of efforts to ease Western fears that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at building an atomic bomb.
Addressing a business forum in Madrid yesterday, Davutoglu said there had “recently been a new proposal... whether Turkey could play a role for the exchange of these different levels of enriched uranium. We are looking at this in a very positive manner.” He said he spoke with Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), following a visit to Turkey by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week. “We hope that there could be a creative solution, and such a solution as a first step would help to overcome the psychological barrier. What we expect from everybody now is to make this a technical process of negotiation rather than an issue of political rhetoric or mutual statements which may harm the process,” Davutoglu added.
Last week, The New York Times reported that the US administration had told Iran that it is willing to allow the country to send its uranium stockpile to any of several nations, including Turkey, for safekeeping.
Citing unnamed administration officials and diplomats, the newspaper said the overtures had been made through the IAEA. But Iran has ignored all of the proposals, it said.
Under a plan put forward by the IAEA on October 21, Iran would ship out its low-enriched uranium, equivalent to more than 70 percent of its estimated stocks, and Russia would further enrich it before France turned it into fuel for a Tehran reactor.
The proposals are designed to assuage fears that Iran could otherwise divert some of the stocks and enrich them further to the much higher levels of purity required to make an atomic bomb.
World powers have endorsed the plan but Iran, which insists its nuclear program is peaceful, has yet to give a final response.
Davutoglu yesterday praised “the new approach of President Obama which is a real window of opportunity.”
(KATHIMERINI, 11/17/2009)