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IAEA chief: Iran should store enriched uranium in Turkey
“It should work,” he said during an interview on Public Broadcasting’s Charlie Rose television show as he ends his tenure as IAEA chief. “Iran has a lot of trust in Turkey.” The Obama administration would agree to this proposal because the US is “very comfortable with Turkey,” he said. ElBaradei, meanwhile, noted that, although he hasn’t presented the idea to the Turkish government, he is confident that Turkish officials would be receptive to holding the material in IAEA custody. Iran would then get fuel for its research reactor in Tehran from Russia. Iran is considering the proposal, he said.
“I am in contact with them every single day,” ElBaradei said in the interview. “They said they would like to keep it on our territory, but I said that defeats the whole purpose of defusing the crisis. We need to get the material out to eliminate the perception that you could develop nuclear weapons tomorrow.”
News reports said Turkey’s permanent representative to the UN, Ambassador Ertuğrul Apakan, was unaware of ElBaradei’s new plan while a comment on the proposal has yet to be made by the US State Department.
Commentators suggested that Iran’s acceptance of such a plan might help ease tensions over its nuclear work, which the US and its allies say is aimed at developing the means to build atomic weapons. Iran says the program is purely civilian.
The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), however, on Saturday, quoted “an informed source in Tehran” who announced that Iran had rejected the IAEA proposal to transfer its enriched uranium to Turkey in order to allay the US and European Union concerns.
The proposal was presented a long time ago by ElBaradei and Tehran rejected it at that time, ISNA quoted the same official as saying, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It seems that the IAEA chief is trying to take advantage of the Iranian president’s upcoming trip to Turkey in the media, the official added in reference to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to İstanbul, which was scheduled to take place yesterday in order to participate in a summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) today.
Ahmadinejad was scheduled to have bilateral talks with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan yesterday after Today’s Zaman went to press.
Ahmadinejad’s visit to Turkey will come only days after Erdoğan’s official visit to the neighboring country, which took place late last month, and only weeks before Erdoğan’s visit to the US on Dec. 7. A White House statement last month said US President Barack Obama looks forward to discussing a broad range of issues with Erdoğan, including “nonproliferation.”
In the last few weeks, Erdoğan has constantly reiterated that countries opposed to Iran’s atomic program should give up their own nuclear weapons and attacked as “arrogant” the sanctions imposed on Ankara’s neighbor. He also said he wanted the Middle East, and then the whole world, to rid itself of nuclear weapons.
During his visit to Tehran, Erdoğan said he backed Tehran’s “right to peaceful nuclear energy,” while calling its approach in nuclear talks with Western powers “positive.”
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