World patience with Iran getting thin: IAEA Chief
Foreign Desk Report

OSLO (Norway)—Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei said Friday the international community is losing patience with Iran over its nuclear program. ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he hopes the outstanding nuclear issues with Iran will be clarified next year. “They are inching forward and I’m asking them to leap forward,” said ElBaradei, who shares the award with the IAEA. He said he hopes outstanding nuclear issues with Tehran will be clarified by the time he presents his next report on Iran in March, because “the international community is losing patience with the nature of that program”.
“The ball is in Iran’s court. It is up to Iran to show the kind of transparency they need to show,” ElBaradei told reporters. He encouraged European negotiators to continue talks with Iran. “The parties need to sit together, discuss their grievances and reach a solution,” he said. “If we can do that without escalating the problem, all the much better”.
No date has been set to resume the talks with Britain, France and Germany, which broke off in August after Tehran restarted uranium conversion, a precursor to enrichment. The IAEA and much of the world community have been pushing Iran’s religious leaders to allow closer inspection of the nuclear program that Tehran claims is intended only for energy. ElBaradei is to receive the Nobel Prize at a ceremony Saturday. The head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, has warned against the possibility of a military strike against Iran if it refuses to abandon its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions.
“I don’t believe there is a military solution to the issue” at this time, ElBaradei told reporters in Oslo Friday where he is to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday. “I think that a military solution would be completely counterproductive,” he said, pointing out that diplomacy and cooperation tend to yield “better results than the stick”. The International Atomic Energy Agency and its director, who will share the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize and an accompanying cheque worth 1.3 million dollars (1.1 million euros), have been instrumental in thorny nuclear negotiations with Iran, threatening to take the country before the UN Security Council for violating nuclear non-proliferation rules.
Iran has insisted that its nuclear program is merely designed to meet domestic energy needs, while the United States and others charge it is a cover for a programme to develop an atomic bomb. Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said earlier Friday that while diplomatic channels remained the best way to deal with the Iran issue, “it is necessary to also prepare the other means.” Israel has repeatedly said it will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons by whatever means necessary.
On Friday, ElBaradei reiterated that “the international community ... is losing patience” with Iran, but pointed out that “the window of opportunity (for finding a diplomatic solution to the problem) is still open”. “But this window of opportunity is not forever,” he said, adding that “the next couple of months are going to be very crucial.” By next March, he said he hoped “things will have moved in the right direction and that we’re not talking about the Security Council”.
“As long as we are moving forward, as long as we haven’t seen an imminent threat, a smoking gun,” it should not be necessary to use “the stick”, ElBaradei said, adding however that “I’m not excluding any option in the future”. “The ball is in Iran’s court. It is up to Iran to show the kind of transparency they need to show.” The IAEA and ElBaradei will receive the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony on Oslo on Saturday “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes”.