New UN sanctions on Iran under discussion

Washington, June 20: The United States and other major powershave begun preliminary consultations on a new set of UN sanctionsrelated to Iran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment, the StateDepartment said today.

Spokesman Sean McCormack said he did not know when a sanctionsresolution might be introduced in the UN Security Council but ''we'retalking about elements of it right now.'' That was part of thediscussions Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns had when he visitedEurope last week, McCormack said, giving no details.

The security council has adopted two sanctions resolutions since December, raising the pressure on Tehran each time.

But instead of halting enrichment, as the UN ordered, Iran hasrapidly extended its program. Enrichment is a key nuclear process usedin power-generation and bomb-building.

The second resolution, approved in March, goes beyond the nuclearsphere by banning Iranian exports of conventional arms and freezingfinancial assets abroad of 28 individuals and entities, includingstate-owned Bank Sepah and the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and the European Union's foreignpolicy chief will meet for a new round of talks about Tehran's nuclearprogram on Saturday in Lisbon, an Iranian news agency said today.

The Mehr News Agency cited an official Iranian statement for theplanned meeting in the Portuguese capital between Iran's Ali Larijaniand the EU's Javier Solana.

In Brussels, Solana's office could not confirm the date or placeof any meeting, but McCormack at a news briefing acknowledged it wouldtake place.

The last Larijani-Solana meeting in Madrid on May 31 yielded no breakthrough.

McCormack said the rationale behind another meeting is ''that onehopes that the Iranian government and the Iranian regime starts to do adifferent cost-benefit analysis here. Clearly, they are much moreisolated than they were one year ago.'' ''So the idea is we're going tocontinue through Mr Solana talking to the Iranian government,encouraging them to find some way to say yes. And that involves, verysimply, finding some way to suspend the Iranian enrichment andreprocessing activities in order to get into negotiations,'' he said.

A senior US official told Reuters there was no expectation the next meeting would break any new ground.

Iran says its program to produce nuclear fuel through uraniumenrichment is solely for electricity generation, but Western powerssuspect it wants to build bombs.

Although top US officials have repeatedly asserted theircommitment to resolving the nuclear issue through diplomacy, USPresident George W Bush today reiterated that all options, includingmilitary action, were on the table over Iran.

Reuters

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