Fabius arrives at Iran nuclear talks still in search of accord
By Bloomberg
Foreign Ministers from France and Germany are joining negotiators on the shores of Lake Geneva in a final push to reach an accord over Iran’s nuclear work before an end- of-March deadline expires.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will have a working lunch with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday in Lausanne, Switzerland. Kerry is also scheduled to negotiate with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
“I have come here with the desire to move toward a robust agreement,” Fabius told reporters before entering the Beau Rivage Palace, where negotiations are being held. “I hope we can achieve a result.”
Diplomats have until March 31 to craft a framework agreement and June 30 to work out all the technical details of an accord. World powers are seeking constraints on Iran’s nuclear capacity while the Persian Gulf country wants relief from sanctions that have battered its economy over the last decade.
“I am not a pessimist in this case and I keep my optimism and hope that we will be getting somewhere,” Iran’s top nuclear official, Ali Akbar Salehi, told reporters Saturday when asked whether technical hurdles could be overcome.
The talks are taking place 18 months after President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pledged in a phone call to try to end the nuclear dispute. On Wednesday, Rouhani said he wrote to Obama and leaders of the other five negotiating nations -- China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.K. -- urging them to overcome differences and make an accord possible.
Hopeful Sign
Rouhani’s outreach was taken as a hopeful sign that an agreement is within reach, a U.S. official said late Friday, asking not to be identified in line with diplomatic rules. Talks aiming to bridge remaining disagreements continued to be tough and very serious, the official said.
Diplomats are still wrangling over how to define the accord and which details to release, three Western diplomats said on Thursday. While U.S. officials insist that any understanding needs hard numbers and details, the Iranian delegation prefers to hold off on specifics until the technical annexes of the agreement are finished, according to the officials.