MOSCOW, November 10 (Itar-Tass) — The IAEA new report on Iran’s nuclear programme can deteriorate the situation and curtail cooperation with Tehran, according to Russian and Chinese experts.
According to director of the Russian Centre for Energy and Security Studies Anton Khlopkov, “the Iranian problem is becoming politicised”. “Iran’s nuclear programme is an irritator for the international community and it has a negative impact on interaction between Iran and other states,” Khlopkov said at the Moscow-Beijing video conference on Thursday.
According to Alexander Vorontsov, chief of the Korea and Mongolia Department of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, “the new IAEA report can aggravate the situation and curtail the existing channels of cooperation with Iran.” “I believe that the report can hardly help the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue,” the Russian expert stressed.
“One cannot try to back Iran into corner,” said Liu Jiangyong, deputy director of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University.
“This will deprive the international community of the possibility to take any steps,” Liu said. In his words, any severe restrictions will seriously hamper the solution of the problem by political and diplomatic means.
Commenting on the IAEA report, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said the report on the Iranian nuclear program had no value for Tehran.
“These conclusions look unfounded to us,” he said. “The IAEA report claiming an allegedly non-peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program has no relation to the mission of this international agency and atomic research.”
He also said that missiles were not an area of the IAEA.
This document “will call into question the impartiality and principled stand of the IAEA and will erode confidence in it,” the minister said.
“Our position is firm and grounded. If Iran had wanted to develop nuclear weapons it would have done that. However, our common sense and experience show that nuclear arms are not a weapon of deterrence,” he said.
“Iran has long been experiencing pressure in the sphere of human rights, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism,” the minister said.
In addition, the Foreign Ministry said Russia was very disappointed and perplexed with the transformation of the Iranian report by the IAEA director general into a source of a new outbreak of tensions around the Iranian nuclear program.
“Before the report was posted officially for IAEA member states in Vienna it became a source of conjectures, rumors and political speculations, which is no compliment to those stirring up the current information campaign,” the ministry said.