* First nuclear talks in 15 months aimed at easing tension
* No major breakthrough expected in Saturday’s meeting
* But could pave ground for further negotiations
* West wants Iran to stop higher-grade enrichment
(Adds analyst quotes, detail, background)
By Fredrik Dahl and Justyna Pawlak
ISTANBUL, April 13 (Reuters) – Iran and the six world powers
prepared on Friday for rare talks aimed at easing fears that a
deepening dispute over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme
could plunge the Middle East into a new war.
Officials from Iran and the six major powers arrived in
Istanbul ahead of Saturday’s bid to restart stalled diplomacy
following months of soaring tension and persistent speculation
that Israel might attack Iranian nuclear sites.
The meeting is widely seen as a chance for the powers – the
United States, France, Russia, China, Britain and Germany – and
Iran to halt a downward diplomatic spiral and start to seek ways
out of years of deadlock.
The West accuses Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear
weapons capability and Israel has hinted at pre-emptive military
strikes to prevent its arch foe from obtaining such arms.
Iran, which has come under increasingly tough Western
sanctions targeting its oil exports, says its nuclear programme
is peaceful and has repeatedly ruled out suspending it.
Diplomats and analysts played down any expectations of a
major breakthrough in the first round of discussions, but said
the meeting may pave the ground for further negotiations aimed
at resolving the decade-long row.
Western officials have made clear their immediate priority
is to convince Tehran to cease the higher-grade uranium
enrichment it started in 2010. Iran has since sharply expanded
that work, shortening the time it would need for any weapons
“break out”.
Iran has signalled some flexibility over halting this work –
refining uranium to a fissile purity of 20 percent compared with
the 5 percent level required for power plants – but also
suggests it is not ready to do so yet.
The talks “will begin a very complex negotiation, and for
several months diplomacy will take some pressure off oil prices
and help keep the chance of Israeli strikes very low,” said
Cliff Kupchan, a Middle East analyst at the Eurasia Group.
But in the end, Kupchan said renewed diplomacy was unlikely
to yield a resolution to the crisis, which has helped push
global oil prices higher this year.
TRUST DEFICIT
Iranian state television showed footage of Iranian chief
nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili getting into a car at the
airport of Turkey’s biggest city.
“The head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Saeed
Jalili, arrived in Istanbul on Friday and was welcomed by local
officials as well as Iran’s envoy to Turkey, Bahman
Hosseinpour,” Iran’s official IRNA news agency said.
Jalili headed a four-member Iranian delegation, state
television said. An Iranian news agency later said his deputy
Ali Baqeri held talks with a senior Chinese official in Istanbul
on Friday and would also meet a Russian delegate.
The formal talks with the six powers and their chief
representative, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine
Ashton, will get underway on Saturday, but Ashton and Jalili are
expected to meet over dinner on Friday evening.
The last time the two sides met, also in Istanbul in January
last year, they could not even agree an agenda.
Both sides signalled in the run-up to Saturday’s discussions
their intent to give diplomacy a real chance.
“We hope that this first round will produce a conducive
environment for concrete results through a sustained process,”
Ashton’s spokesman Michael Mann said in an email.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, in a rare opinion
piece in a U.S. newspaper, said his country hoped that all sides
would commit to comprehensive dialogue and that negotiators make
“genuine efforts to reestablish confidence and trust”.
Defying toughening sanctions, Iran has continued to expand
its uranium enrichment programme – activity which can have both
civilian and military purposes – and experts say it now has
enough material for four atomic bombs if processed much further.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a director of the International Institute
for Strategic Studies think-tank, said getting Iran to halt 20
percent enrichment would be an interim goal “to put a lid on the
most troublesome” aspect of Iran’s nuclear programme.
A long-term deal will have to “provide confidence that Iran
cannot quickly produce nuclear weapons,” he told Reuters, adding
this would require both better monitoring of Iran’s nuclear work
and limits on its uranium enrichment and stockpiles.
(Additional reporting by Zahra Hosseinian, Jonathan Burch,
Alexandra Hudson, Ayla Jean Yackley and Ece Toksabay; Editing by
Jon Hemming)
