Iran flexible on sanctions timing in order to seal nuclear deal, Zarif suggests

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/29/iran-timing-nuclear-deal-zarif

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Iran would accept a “few weeks” between the curtailment of its nuclear program and the end of crippling international sanctions, its foreign minister suggested on Wednesday.

Although Mohammed Javad Zarif emphasized the importance of “simultaneous” implementation of both sides’ obligations in an emergent nuclear deal, he provided the first public indication that Tehran could accept wiggle room over timing to secure a historic deal with the west.

At times defiant, acidic and charming during a speech at New York University, Zarif said the deal was a “once-in-a-decade” opportunity.

A resolution in the United Nations security council – set to launch almost immediately after a deal is reached over Iran’s nuclear program – will immediately oblige Iran to reduce both the number of centrifuges at its enrichment sites and its stockpile of enriched uranium, and also to convert its heavy-water reactor at Arak to a research facility.

But the question of when international economic sanctions on Iran will be lifted remains one of the largest unresolved subjects for negotiators.

“That is the point where we take these measures, preparation for these measures, and the sanctions will be removed. How this will be done, we know the concept. The concept is these will be simultaneous,” said Zarif, speaking in English.

But when asked if the end of the sanctions would need to occur before international verification of Iran’s compliance, Zarif was less categorical.

“These are steps that should only take a few weeks. Sanctions are off,” Zarif said. “The time they will take effect [is] the time our steps will take effect.”

A ‘factsheet’ issued by the state department in the wake of a 2 April preliminary accord in Lausanne said Iran would receive sanctions relief only after it had been verified it had taken “all of its key nuclear-related steps”. The Iranian leadership, including the supreme leader, have insisted that the lifting of sanctions should be lifted on the first day the agreement comes into effect.

By showing acceptance of reciprocal steps, plus a gap of a few weeks to allow for verification, the Iranian foreign minister showed a new level of flexibility on how a comprehensive agreement, due to be signed by the end of June, could be implemented.

Zarif, who said he would not negotiate the terms of the unfinalized agreement in public, did not discuss whether Iran would accept staggering the end of the sanctions, which is the strong preference of the Obama administration.

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Ending sanctions on Iran wholesale and up front is likely to encounter massive resistance in the US Congress, where the Republican party and many Democrats have been intensely critical of the government’s diplomacy with its chief Middle Eastern adversary. Yet Barack Obama won a preliminary legislative victory on Tuesday as the Senate rejected a move to consider a nuclear deal a treaty, which would have given the Senate a de facto veto over its adoption.

Zarif dismissed congressional concerns as irrelevant – even poking fun at Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who mused about bombing Iran soon after the Lausanne breakthrough was announced – and placed responsibility for overcoming them on Barack Obama.

Obama “will have to stop implementing all the sanctions, economic and financial sanctions, that have been imposed on Iran, by executive order, by Congress. However he does it, that’s his problem – as it will be my problem to implement certain measures,” Zarif said.

The negotiating teams will send lower-level delegations to discuss finalization of the accord ahead of a self-imposed 30 June deadline on Thursday. Zarif said high-level delegations will seek to build upon the preliminary understanding reached on 2 April in Lausanne when they resume on Monday “somewhere in Europe.”

The Iranian foreign minister said it would be a “travesty to lose this possibility” and acknowledged the uphill struggle of his US and European counterparts to sell the deal: “A lot of people have spent a lot of political capital on this process.”

But Zarif argued that Washington – not Tehran – was the intransigent party. He used a term that has come to mean the return of sanctions to punish violations of the deal to suggest that Iran’s dismantlement of nuclear infrastructure was not permanent.

“If anyone is concerned about snapback, they should be worried about US violating its obligation and Iran snapping back,” Zarif said.

Zarif sounded more defiant notes when asked about Iranian human rights and regional stability. Despite years of Iranian efforts to actively undermine US policy in the Middle East, the foreign minister dismissed US and Sunni Arab accusations that Iran is a destabilizing force.

He cast Iranian adversaries – the US, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State – as unreasonable aggressors, pointedly reminding them of their support for Saddam Hussein, and absolved Tehran’s ally Bashar Assad of responsibility for a four-year war estimated to have killed over 200,000 people.

“People who are accusing the government of Syria and saying that the government of Syria has blood of so many people on its hands should go back and do a little bit of soul searching,” Zarif said, arguing that the US insistence that Assad lose power has prevented a negotiated resolution to a conflict in which Assad has used barrel bombs and chemical weapons against his opposition.

Zarif spoke in New York a day after Iran intercepted a civilian cargo ship flagged by the Marshall Islands, which by diplomatic accord is under the US defense umbrella. US senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, defense hawks who oppose detente with Tehran, called the seizure “a serious and deliberate provocation against the United States”.

Zarif portrayed the seizure as a naval enforcement of a court order against a delinquent shipping company and insisted it had no greater geopolitical significance. “We shouldn’t read too much into it,” he said.

While the nuclear accord is not final, the US and Iran are already shifting regional dynamics and scrambling old alliances in a manner many, and potentially even the two adversaries themselves, find bewildering. They are on opposite sides of the Syrian conflict; on the same side of the fight against the Islamic State; and on opposite sides of the Yemen conflict, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have overthrown the proxy US government and are now under bombardment by US ally Saudi Arabia, which is uncomfortable with the nuclear deal.

Echoing Obama, Zarif also said it would be premature to jump from a nuclear accord to a broader rapprochement with Washington.

“We want no weapons and we want to have normal relations with the west – not yet with the United States,” he said. “If we reach that understanding, which should not be that difficult, then we can build on it.”

He also sent a warning to Obama’s potential presidential successors that they will back away from a nuclear deal at their peril.

“I believe the United States will risk isolating itself in the world if there is an agreement and it decides to break it,” Zarif said.