No Iaea Board Of Governors Iran Work Plan Endorsement by Mark Hibbs

Iran has been making quarterly statements to the IAEA Board of Governors (BOG) for nine long years. That’s longer than most current IAEA member state permanent mission representatives in Vienna can recall because virtually none of these individuals were here in Vienna back then. But there are a few exceptions. And today one of them showed me that institutional memory matters.

Agenda item 7(d) of this week’s routine quarterly BOG meeting wrapped up today was ”Implementation of IAEA Safeguards and Relevant UNSC Resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

True to form, during the discussion of that agenda item, Iran made a statement to the BOG this morning. Iran’s report represented the last scheduled occasion for Iran to make a comprehensive statement about its nuclear program before meeting with the six powers in Moscow on June 18. For that reason, the audience inside the boardroom in the M Building at the VIC today were particularly attentive.

Delegates were treated to a broadside by Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh suggesting that Iran isn’t about to come to Moscow in a mood to cooperate. Among other points, Soltanieh told us today:

• The IAEA is an “international technical organization” only and is acting beyond its mandate in pursuing bogus ”intelligence information” about alleged nuclear activities in member states

• The IAEA is not really a United Nations agency at all, and therefore cannot be instructed by the Security Council to expand its mandate

• “Involvement of the UNSC in [IAEA] matters has created a political and security dimension and prevented the [IAEA] to continue [sic] its smooth technical verification activities.”

• “The only reason that the [Iranian nuclear] file is still open is due to politically motivated allegations by a couple of Western countries.”

• The UNSC nuclear resolutions on Iran “lack… legal and technical basis.”

• Iran will never suspend its uranium enrichment program as called for by the UNSC resolutions

Most of this we have heard before, in fact since 2005 we’ve heard it many times. But with a little less than two weeks to go before Moscow, a lot of people in the boardroom interpreted this outburst as a signal that Iran on June 18 will not compromise. Is that really true? If the six powers during the next two weeks offer something more to Iran than spare parts for Boeing aircraft and additional Russian nuclear power cooperation, maybe there will be movement. But since we don’t really know what Iran is being offered by the six powers, we can’t say. More