By Farshid Motahari Sep 16, 2008, 11:21 GMT
Tehran - The West considers the latest report by the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Iran's nuclear activities as another reason to impose new financial sanctions on the Islamic state.
Tehran, however, regards the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) report as yet another confirmation for the peaceful nature of its nuclear programmes.
'The latest IAEA report has once again acknowledged that there was no evidence which would show that Tehran's peaceful nuclear activities have been diverted for other purposes and hence confirmed Iran's longstanding assertions about their (peaceful) nature,' Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said.
The IAEA report, released to the 35 member states of its governing board on Monday, said Iran was continuing to expand its uranium enrichment programme while obfuscating UN efforts to verify the nature of the country's nuclear ambitions.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei also said that the agency had new information relating to past Iranian nuclear weapons-related studies, but had received no cooperation from Tehran in clarifying their details.
The director general, however, also noted that his inspectors had not found evidence of actual nuclear weapons manufacturing in their investigation of the programme which Iran kept secret for 18 years.
'The IAEA report acknowledged that there was no evidence showing that Tehran's peaceful nuclear activities had been diverted for other (military) purposes,' said Iran's IAEA envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh.
Tehran says that, in line with the principles of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the IAEA is merely in charge of verifying whether or not Iran's nuclear projects were for civil purposes.
Iran rejects documents on alleged weaponization studies as fakes and refuses to further address the issue.
'The IAEA cannot expect that every time the US raises new baseless allegations, Iran would reply to them via the IAEA. We are not playing this game,' said Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the parliamentary foreign policy and security commission.
Mottaki said that for some countries, the issue was not really the nuclear programme. He accused the West of making repeated baseless claims and merely 'looking for excuses' to tarnish Iran's good cooperation with the IAEA, which he stressed Tehran would continue.
Iran says that as a signatory of the NPT and member of the IAEA, the country has a right to pursue a civilian nuclear programme, including a full fuel cycle which includes the proliferation-prone uranium enrichment process.
According to the IAEA, Iran is operating close to 3,800 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment plant in central Iran and has so far produced a total of 480 kilograms of low-grade enriched uranium.
The IAEA report added that Iran could in two years manufacture 1,700 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, enough, if further enriched, to build a nuclear bomb.
Tehran denies such perspectives and says that the enrichment would never exceed the 5-per-cent level for fuel and its final aim is generating electricity and using nuclear technology in medicine and other relevant fields.
'The IAEA has failed to forward related documents for the allegations but Iran has several times proven that the US claims were totally baseless,' Soltanieh said.
Despite three United Nations Security Council sanctions resolutions, Tehran has vowed to continue its nuclear programme and defy international demands to halt the enrichment process. It is widely expected that Iran would not change this position, prolonging the stalemate.
'Even if the IAEA chief reports on Iran ten years later, he will give the same message that there is no evidence at hand to substantiate diversion in Iran's nuclear activities to military grade,' Soltanieh added.
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