Iran will not back down from ‘nuclear rights’, says president

DUBAI: Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said on Saturday Tehran would not give up its right to develop its nuclear industry for peaceful purposes, and all parties involved in talks to revive the 2015 nuclear accord should respect this.

Eleven months of indirect talks between Iran and the United States in Vienna have stalled as both sides say political decisions are required by Tehran and Washington to settle the remaining issues.

“For more than the one-hundredth time, our message from Tehran to Vienna is that we will not back off from the Iranian people’s nuclear rights ... not even an iota,” state media quoted Raisi as saying in a speech marking Iran’s Nuclear Technology Day.

Raisi reiterated Iran’s stand that its nuclear programme is solely for peaceful purposes.

The United States is considering removing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from its foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) blacklist in return for Iranian assurances about reining in the elite force, Iranian and Western sources said.

A senior administration official said President Joe Biden did not intend to remove the group from the terrorism designation, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who specialises in intelligence matters, reported on Friday.

One Iranian diplomat said that Tehran had rejected a US proposal to overcome the sticking point by keeping the IRGC’s overseas arm, the Quds Force, under FTO sanctions, while delisting the IRGC as an entity.

The IRGC is a powerful faction in Iran that controls a business empire as well as elite armed and intelligence forces that Washington accuses of carrying out a global terrorist campaign.

The nuclear deal collapsed four years ago when former president Donald Trump withdrew the United States and imposed crushing sanctions on Iran. In the meantime, Iran has vastly expanded its nuclear work.

Iran has long denied it has tried to secretly develop nuclear weapons, saying its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Mohammad Eslami, said on April 9 that Iran will soon begin construction of a new nuclear power plant near the town of Darkhovin in oil-rich Khuzestan Province in the country’s southwest.

The plant was supposed to be built before the 1979 Islamic Revolution with help from France but the project was halted in its initial phase.

The site became a major battlefield in the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq that began in 1980.

Iran’s sole nuclear power plant went online in 2011 with help from Russia in the southern port city of Bushehr.

In related news, Iran announced that it had imposed symbolic sanctions on more U.S. officials over their roles in harming Iran, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on April 9.

In January, Iran placed sanctions on more than 50 Americans for their alleged roles in killing a top Iranian general in Iraq in 2020. In 2021 Iran imposed sanctions on Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and eight others.

The sanctions ban the targeted persons from travel to Iran and possible confiscation of their assets in Iran. They are seen as symbolic as the Americans don’t have any assets in Iran.