COMMENT A tale of a missed opportunity over
Iran By Peter Jenkins
When two or more aficionados of the
Iranian nuclear controversy are gathered together,
the conversation will turn at some point to
whether opportunities for resolving the issue
peacefully have been missed.
Some see a
missed opportunity in the first George W Bush
administration's refusal to countenance an Iranian
negotiating proposal transmitted by Switzerland in
May 2003. Others lament the inability of France,
Germany and the United Kingdom to accept the
limited resumption of uranium enrichment in Iran,
in 2005, in return for a range of
confidence-building measures and safeguards
against the diversion of nuclear material to
military purposes.
I regret that it
occurred to no one in the autumn of 2003 to link
Iran's voluntary
suspension of work on the development of an
enrichment capacity to completion of International
Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) verification
under the Additional Protocol, a voluntary but
advanced nuclear safeguards standard introduced in
the mid-1990s.
On October 16, 2003, the
then Director General of the IAEA, Mohamed
ElBaradei, flew to Tehran to discuss with the
secretary of Iran's National Security Council, the
contours of a deal with the foreign ministers of
France, Germany and the UK. The proposal, in
essence, was that if Iran suspended its nuclear
fuel cycle activities, allowed IAEA inspectors the
access and cooperation envisaged in the Additional
Protocol, and entered into talks with the three
European powers (the E3) about the future of its
nuclear program, the E3 would ensure that the IAEA
board of governors refrained both from declaring
that Iran had been in non-compliance with its
safeguards obligations and from reporting that
non-compliance to the United Nations Security
Council, where the Bush administration was waiting
to pounce like a tiger on its prey. The flaw
in the agreement with the E3, as discovered five
days later, was the absence of timelines. The
Iranians were reluctant to commit themselves to
suspension for a particular length of time,
because they were hoping to resume the development
of an enrichment capacity as soon as the risk of a
referral to the Security Council had passed. The
E3 were reluctant to press Iran to make such a
commitment because they wanted Iran's suspension
to last indefinitely. And the IAEA, if asked,
would have declined to say how many years would be
needed to complete Additional Protocol
verification, because they were conscious of many
uncertainties.
Yet had ElBaradei tried and
succeeded in persuading a vulnerable Iran to
maintain its voluntary suspension until the
completion of Additional Protocol verification,
the risk of another war in the Gulf, which the
world faces today, would be far less acute.
At the conclusion of an Additional
Protocol investigation the IAEA secretariat
reports to the board of governors that it is in a
position to provide a credible assurance about
"the absence of undeclared nuclear activities or
material" in the country in question. Had these
words been pronounced in relation to Iran at any
time since 2003, even the most hawkish of Western
adversaries would have found it hard to argue that
Iran's nuclear activities posed a threat to
international peace and had to be curtailed.
Instead, Iran renounced suspension after
two years; the E3 retaliated by engineering a
non-compliance report to the Security Council;
Iran counter-retaliated by ceasing to allow the
IAEA to undertake Additional Protocol
verification; the IAEA secretariat has had no
option since but to report that it is not in a
position to provide Protocol non-proliferation
assurances; an alleged proliferation threat has
been used to justify a steady multiplication of
sanctions; and demands for an (unlawful) act of
aggression to destroy Iran's nuclear plants have
grown ever more frequent.
All this begs
two questions: why did Iran cease applying the
Additional Protocol in 2006 and why have they not
voluntarily reapplied it since? Nothing forced
Iran to reduce cooperation with the IAEA to the
legal minimum in 2006. They could have resumed
enrichment work but continued to grant Protocol
access. And since 2006 they could have
wrong-footed their adversaries by reapplying the
Protocol and winning the best guarantee the IAEA
can give: "no undeclared nuclear activities or
material".
I don't know the answers. It's
a puzzle. Is this simply a case of reluctance to
lose face by reversing an unwise decision? Are the
Iranians worried that granting Protocol access
would enable the IAEA to discover undeclared
activities and/or material, aggravating Iran's
Security Council predicament? Has Iran lost all
confidence in the impartiality and professionalism
of the IAEA secretariat, which was accused last
year of taking instructions from Iran's Western
adversaries?
One thing, however, is
certain: if Iran wants to put an end to repeated
Western calls for it to prove that its nuclear
program is exclusively peaceful, reapplying the
Additional Protocol is the solution. The one and
only proof of a peaceful program that the
non-proliferation community cannot contest are the
assurances that can result from the IAEA's
Protocol investigations: "no undeclared nuclear
activities or material". Those words are the key
to demonstrating to the world that there is no
nuclear proliferation justification for
sanctioning Iran or threatening it with
devastation.
Peter Jenkins is a
former United Kingdom ambassador to the
International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA).
The opinions expressed are his own.
Used with permission lobelog.com, Jim
Lobe's blog on foreign policy.
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