Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif, head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation Ali Akbar Salehi and Hossein Fereydoon (right), brother and close aide to President Hassan Rouhani, are pictured during their meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry at a hotel in Vienna yesterday.

 

AFP/Vienna
The United States and Iran were making “a genuine” effort to overcome the toughest hurdles still blocking a deal to curtail the Iranian nuclear programme, US Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday.
As he met once again with his Iranian counterpart Mohamed Javad Zarif in the Austrian capital, Kerry insisted that while difficult issues remained they were making progress ahead of a new Tuesday deadline for an accord to put a nuclear bomb out of Iran’s reach.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s chief of staff, Mohamed Nahavandian, was meanwhile headed to the negotiations in Vienna, in what the official Irna news agency called a “special mission”.
“We have some tough issues, but there’s been a genuine effort by everybody to be serious about this and to understand the time constraints that we’re working under,” Kerry said.
Global powers are trying to draw the curtain on almost two years of negotiations, which gathered new impetus after Rouhani took power in late 2013. A deal would end a 13-year standoff with Iran over its suspect nuclear programme.
But Kerry is also under pressure to send any deal to the US Congress by July 9 to give it 30 days to review it.
If the deal is reached after July 9, the Republican-controlled body will have 60 days to vote to approve or disapprove of the deal.
The teams were working “very diligently all day in order to maximise progress” and with “a great sense of purpose”, Kerry said.
Many of the ministers from the negotiating global powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States—are due back in Vienna tomorrow.
“We’re all trying very hard in order to be able to move forward and we have made some progress,” Zarif said.
“There are still tough issues to discuss and to resolve but I think, with political will, we will.”
Ahead of the deadline, the chief negotiators of Iran, the United States and the European Union haggled for six hours until 3am (0100 GMT) yesterday, a senior US official said.
“It feels like the end,” said one Western diplomat. “The technical work is advancing on the main text, on the appendices.”
In exchange for scaling back its nuclear programme, Iran is seeking a lifting of painful sanctions.
Russia’s top negotiator Sergei Ryabkov on Thursday voiced cautious optimism, saying a complex text and annexes were “91%” finished.
“I can’t predict how many hours it will take to resolve this situation. But all parties are of the opinion that this matter will be resolved in the coming days,” Ryabkov, deputy foreign minister, told Russian news agency Tass.
It will be up to the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to verify Iran is sticking to its side of the bargain through enhanced inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
But the P5+1 also want the IAEA to be able to visit sites where there is no declared nuclear material to probe alleged efforts, before 2003 and possibly since, to develop a nuclear weapon in secret.
On Thursday IAEA chief Yukiya Amano visited Tehran to meet Rouhani, hoping to jumpstart a stalled probe into the so-called “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s activities.
But after he returned, an IAEA statement suggested there had been no breakthrough.
“I believe that both sides have a better understanding on some ways forward, though more work will be needed,” Amano said.
Iran rejects the allegations of a covert grab for a bomb, saying they are based on bogus intelligence provided to a gullible and partial IAEA by the likes of the CIA and Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s lead negotiator in Vienna, told Iranian media yesterday that Tehran was “ready to co-operate with Mr Amano so that it can be proved that these accusations and claims... are baseless”.





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