ElBaradei's report
deconstructed By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
Two years ago, Mohammad
ElBaradei, the chief of International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), repeatedly insisted that
Iran should sign the intrusive, but voluntary,
Additional Protocol to the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)[1] .
Now he
has gone on record as stating that Iran must
comply with other measures "well beyond the
Additional Protocol". Clearly, the sky is the
limit and the IAEA has been pressured to make
unreasonable demands on Iran well beyond the
purview of its agreements with that country.
The European Union - three of whose
countries, Britain, France and Germany (EU-3) are
negotiating with Iran on its nuclear program - on
Saturday pressed Iran to halt its resumed
conversion activities before September 19, the
date when the IAEA will hold its Board of
Governors' meeting.
Europe's ultimatum
came soon after ElBaradei submitted a
comprehensive report on Tehran's nuclear program,
which
criticized Iran for failing
to keep its suspension on uranium-enrichment
activities and defined Tehran's cooperation with
the agency on its nuclear issue as "overdue".
In his report of September 3, ElBaradei,
after a restatement of his previous reports on
Iran listing the areas of cooperation and
non-cooperation, demanded that Iran's
"transparency measures should extend beyond the
formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement
and Additional Protocol and include access to
individuals, documentation related to procurement,
dual-use equipment, certain military-owned
workshops and research and development
locations".(Item 50).
This raises a
curious question: can Iran, short of giving up all
its military secrets and revealing sensitive
military information to the West via the IAEA,
ever appease the IAEA and its increasingly
demanding chief? Probably not, at least not as
long as Western pressure to dispatch Iran's
nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council is on.
All eyes are now set on the September 19
meeting, and in light of ElBaradei's report that
Iran had failed to heed the IAEA's request to
suspend its resumption of uranium conversion
activities in Isfahan, there is a great likelihood
that the IAEA will follow the EU-US's guide to
action by complaining against Iran to the Security
Council with a view to having sanctions instituted
against Tehran.
However, Russia said on
Monday that it opposed sending Iran's case to the
Security Council, potentially putting itself on a
collision course with the US as Moscow holds a
veto in the council.
While it remains to
be seen if the express train to the Security
Council can be somehow slowed by the combined
pressure from countries of the Non-Aligned
Movement that are members of the IAEA Governing
Board and Washington's preoccupation with the
natural disaster caused by hurricane Katrina,
currently a critical evaluation of ElBaradei's
report, to gauge the strength of case against
Iran, is called for.
Titled
"Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in
the Islamic Republic of Iran", the IAEA chief's
report cites "good progress" in Iran's "corrective
measures" since October 2003 (Item 43), resulting
in the IAEA's verification of certain aspects of
Iran's declarations, particularly on the
"outstanding issue" of the sources of
contamination of Iran's equipment with HEU (highly
enriched uranium), which turns out be none other
than Pakistan (Item 12).
The report
reiterates the earlier finding, in November 2004,
that "all the declared nuclear material in Iran
has been accounted for, and therefore such
material has not been diverted to prohibited
activities". (Item 51).
Furthermore, the
report cites several Iranian "transparency
measures" even beyond the Additional Protocol,
such as allowing inspection access to Iran's
military bases (Item 37), and Iran's submission of
comprehensive declarations with respect to its
nuclear facilities, including design information
(Item 5). It states that other than a tardiness in
providing the latter, "No additional failures have
been identified."(Item 8).
Interestingly,
the report makes a passing reference to the
Subsidiary Agreement between Iran and the IAEA,
and yet somehow overlooks that in light of Iran's
entry into this agreement in the 1990s, Iran was
under no legal obligation to report some of its
activities nowadays branded as "breaches of
obligation".
The fact that the IAEA chief
overlooks such a delicate and yet significant
matter casts a long shadow on his credibility as
fair and objective. It is important to see the
nuance here, to distinguish between "clandestine"
and "illegal" in light of the so-called
"loopholes" in Iran's Safeguards Agreement with
the IAEA whereby Iran was entitled to withhold
information to the IAEA for a specified period
prior to the introduction of nuclear material at
its facilities. Western media are awash with
oversight of this important distinction, and yet
one naturally expects a little more nuanced
understanding from the IAEA chief.
On the
other hand, the report makes clear that Iran's
uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz remained
suspended, that the converted uranium had been
relocated to safe storages, and that UF6, ie,
uranium hexafluoride, the feed material that flows
through the centrifuges in the enrichment process,
"remained under agency seals".(Item 59) This, in
turn, raises the question: what is the ground for
the present Western panic about Iran as long as
Iran has not abrogated its agreement with its
European counterparts for maintaining a suspension
of centrifuges?
After all, as long as
Natanz remains shut down, there is actually little
to worry about uranium conversion operations in
Isfahan, which serve as the initial phases in the
nuclear fuel cycle, and which have been under full
IAEA monitoring since 2000. The bottom line,
contrary to the hue and cry of the Europeans, is
that the Paris Agreement is still alive and has
not been breached by Iran, except incrementally
and benignly, hardly warranting the panic
reactions it has solicited in Europe and the US.
Under the Paris Agreement of November 2004, Tehran
agreed to voluntarily suspend nuclear work under a
deal with the EU-3.
Again, Western media
are partly to blame. A case in point: reports from
both Reuters and the New York Times on ElBaradei's
latest report make outlandish claims that the
report says Iran's nuclear program is "shrouded in
mystery", when, in fact, a glance at the report
clearly shows not only the absence of such an
adjective, but also plenty of ammunition to think
otherwise, that is, a pattern of greater and
greater transparency culminating in putting to
rest key anxieties of the IAEA about the nature of
Iran's nuclear program.
Of course,
ElBaradei slams Iran for "lack of full
transparency", but then again, Iran is not alone
and per his own admission, dozens of IAEA member
states are similarly guilty of lack of full
cooperation, including Brazil and South Korea, a
point aptly made to ElBaradei by a reformist
Iranian parliamentarian two years ago in a letter
to the IAEA.
The nub of the problem with
the IAEA is, per ElBaradei's own admission, that
"the agency's legal authority to pursue the
verification of possible nuclear weapons-related
activity is limited".(Item 49). This is a
built-in, structural problem of the
non-proliferation regime transcending Iran applied
to Iran specifically, and unreasonably so, giving
rise to the question: how in the world can the
IAEA ever give Iran's nuclear program a clean bill
of health. That is, confirming the absence of a
nuclear-weapons program, short of inspecting every
inch of the country, as was demanded of Iraq prior
to the 2003 invasion?
By setting the bar
so high, the IAEA opens a Pandora's Box of "Iran
exceptionalism", following the logic of
diminishing returns whereby the more Iran
cooperates, the less satisfied the IAEA becomes
due to its limitless demands not set by its own
parameters (enshrined in the Additional Protocol).
On a related note, the IAEA's own findings
about Iran's bargains with Pakistani nuclear
blackmarketeers, such as turning down offers of
nuclear-weapons drawings and parts in the 1980s,
simply reinforce the Iranian position that it is
not interested in acquiring nuclear weapons.
Similarly, with regard to Iran's
experiment with plutonium separation there is a
dispute as to when exactly these experiments
occurred - early or mid-1990s, and a final answer
is awaiting further lab analysis. Yet no one at
the IAEA is even suggesting that Iran has
continued this experiment into the 21st century,
this while admitting that Iran's explanation of
the time discrepancy, that the plutonium found in
a bottle in 1995 had been "purified" as a result
of experiments, is "plausible".
ElBaradei's report repeatedly states that
in light of Iran's steady cooperation and
increasing transparency, resolving the outstanding
concerns cited above, Iran's nuclear issue "would
be followed up as matters of routine
safeguards"(Item 6), hardly the signpost to a
nuclear crisis requiring an emergency gathering at
the Security Council mandated to deal with clear
and present dangers of war and potential conflict,
let alone invoking Chapter VII and imposing
sanctions on Iran - for what, failure to comply
with a confidence-building and
"legally-non-binding" request of the IAEA?
Clearly, the legal ground for Security Council
action is pretty thin, if not lacking.
The
excesses and various flaws of ElBaradei's report
and management of Iran's nuclear issue cited above
may in the end come to haunt the IAEA in view of
Iran's past threat to exit the NPT treaty if its
case is referred to the Security Council.
That would spell doom for the troubled
non-proliferation regime and, instead of full
transparency, ElBaradei may find Iran back in the
"black hole" of information it was prior to 2003,
whereas a prudent approach would build on the
present cooperation and avoid excess demands not
justified by the IAEA's framework. For the moment,
however, a necessary corrective to the IAEA's
excesses may be none other than an Iranian
declaration that from now on no more measures
beyond the Additional Protocol will be even
contemplated, let alone implemented.
Lest
we forget, President George W Bush in his speech
at the National Defense University on February 11,
2004 stated, "I propose that by next year, only
states that have signed the Additional Protocol be
allowed to import equipment for their civil
nuclear programs." Given the fact that ElBaradei's
report confirms that Iran has been implementing
the Additional Protocol as if it had been
ratified, and the Bush administration's stated
support for the latest European initiative toward
Iran, promising nuclear cooperation with Iran, one
wonders why the White House is reluctant to take
the next logical step and promise concrete steps
with regards to existing Iran sanctions that
prevent such cooperation with Iran by foreign
companies (if and when the issue of objective
guarantee is somehow settled)?
Concerning
the latter, various experts, such as David
Albright, a former IAEA nuclear inspector, have
maintained that it is possible to verify Iran's
enrichment process. In a recent article in the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Albright writes:
"As long as safeguards are in place, the IAEA
would know if such an increase in enrichment level
occurs."
Even French President Jacques
Chirac in his June meeting with Iran's then top
nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, consented to
exploring an IAEA-led option of ascertaining the
issue of objective guarantee, albeit fleetingly as
Chirac and his foreign minister were subsequently
forced to retract their statements because of
external pressure, principally by London.
In conclusion, with reports of European
disarray over Iran, and clear signs of growing
division between Great Britain on the one hand and
France and Germany on the other, the roadmap to
the Security Council is paved with confused
intentions and no amount of diplomatic facade at
unity can hide the core problem of an illogical,
paranoid resistance toward the option of a
monitored, contained enrichment process in Iran.
This resistance may be melting in some quarters in
Europe, but it is simultaneously hardened by a
determined US effort to stop Iran's nuclear
program one way or another.
Note [1] The Additional
Protocol substantially expands the IAEA's ability
to check for clandestine nuclear facilities by
providing the agency with authority to visit any
facility - declared or not - to investigate
questions about or inconsistencies in a state's
nuclear declarations.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-authored "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of
World Affairs, Volume X11, issue 2, Summer 2005,
with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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