China supports Barack Obama’s call for new Iran sanctions
14:14 / 01.04.2010 New sanctions on Iran came a significant step closer today, when China agreed to begin drafting a UN resolution imposing measures aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear programme, APA reports citing Guardian.co.uk web-page.
According to officials with knowledge of the talks, an agreement to begin drafting a new security council resolution was reached in a telephone call involving representatives from the five permanent council members – the US, China, Russia, Britain and France – and Germany.
The negotiations will now move to New York, where diplomats will hammer out a sanctions package. Barack Obama said yesterday he hoped the UN would pass a sanctions resolution quickly.
"My hope is that we are going to get this done this spring. I’m not interested in waiting months for a sanctions regime to be in place. I’m interested in seeing that regime in weeks," the president said during a joint White House appearance with his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Obama said the long-term consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran were unacceptable and that Tehran had so far rejected diplomatic entreaties. But he added: "The door remains open if the Iranians choose to walk through it."
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insists its nuclear industry is for peaceful power generation.
Negotiations over sanctions have taken months in the past and although Obama says he would like a deal done this spring, they are likely to be protracted again. Both China and Russia want a much narrower set of measures than the Americans and western Europeans have been seeking.
Following the revelation last September that Tehran had been building a covert uranium enrichment plant near Qom, and the collapse of a compromise deal by which Iran would export the bulk of its enriched uranium stockpile for processing, Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, had agreed the need for new sanctions.
But until today, Beijing had held out against US-led pressure to begin drafting a resolution. The talks were complicated by other flashpoints in US-China relations, particularly American arms sales to Taiwan in January and Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in February.
Bringing China to the negotiating table will be seen in Washington as a diplomatic breakthrough, but the degree of Obama’s success in winning the argument will be measured by the final terms of the UN resolution, and on how long it takes to agree.
China is in the process of changing its delegation at the UN, a move that could delay negotiations further. Some officials said they expected the security council talks to drag on to June.Bu yazı ( 320 ) - dəfə oxunmuşdur
