IAEA 'mismanagement' raises Tehran's ire

[bemildred]

This week, the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is holding a meeting in Vienna and, as expected, non-proliferation issues pertaining to North Korea and Iran will be given top priority. This is at a time when United States officials have made optimum use of the IAEA's recent report that indirectly confirms that Iran has "sufficient fissile material to make a bomb", to quote Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In his opening address to the IAEA meeting, Mohammad ElBaradei, the agency's director general, said that Iran's nuclear activities were being monitored and there was no evidence of military diversion, adding however that "Iran has not suspended its enrichment-related activities, or its work on heavy water-related projects. Nor has Iran implemented the Additional Protocol . Iran has not permitted the agency to perform the required design information verification at the IR-40 reactor currently under construction. Such access, together with the sampling of destroyed and salvaged equipment and debris, is essential for the agency to complete its assessment."

ElBaradei has been downplaying Iran's cooperation for some time, raising the ire of Tehran and leading some commentators to attribute this to, among other things, such extraneous factors as the new low in Iran-Egypt relations. This is in light of ElBaradei's Egyptian background and growing tensions between Tehran and Cairo over the recent Gaza war and Cairo's reported readiness to embrace the exiled Iranian opposition, the Mujahideen-e Khalq Organization, which is getting kicked out of Iraq.

A Tehran University political science professor, expressing Tehran's growing dissatisfaction with respect to the IAEA's performance, asked: "Mr ElBaradei in his own reports has repeatedly confirmed that (a) 'The agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran' and (b) that 'all nuclear material in the country remain under agency containment and surveillance', so the question is why is he suddenly quiet on all that is positive in Iran's cooperation with the IAEA?"


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