Turkey, which is attempting to facilitate a round of nuclear talks with the Big Six countries, said last week on a trip to Tehran that Iran had agreed to resume talks.
“We are waiting for a good result coming out of the willingness of the two parties to go back to the negotiating table,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
Ali-Akbar Salehi, the Iranian foreign minister, told reporters during his recent visit to Turkey that Iran is already engaged in working out the details – such as dates and venues – for the talks.
“Most probably, I am not sure yet, the venue will be Istanbul. The day is not yet settled, but it will be soon,” he told reporters while visiting Turkey.
But the EU, which had invited Iran for talks in a letter sent three months ago in October 2011, expressed exasperation with Iran, saying there had not been any written confirmation received from Iran that it is interested in talks.
“There are no negotiations underway on new talks,” said a spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who is in charge of arranging talks.
“We are still waiting for Iran to respond to the substantive proposals the High Representative [Ashton] made in her letter from October,” Ashton’s spokesman said in Brussels.
Britain was similarly blunt in its response to the news about talks from Iran. “There are no dates or concrete plans because Iran has yet to demonstrate clearly that it is willing to respond to Baroness Ashton’s letter and negotiate without preconditions,” said a British Foreign Office spokesman.
“Until it does so, the international community will only increase pressure on it through further peaceful and legitimate sanctions,” he said.
Diplomatic observers said the Islamic Republic was acting unprofessionally. Talking about talks with Davutoglu may make the Turks feel important, but Ashton is the one in charge, they said.
The last talks with the Big Six—China, Russia, Germany, France, Britain and the United States—were last January. They lasted one day and accomplished nothing. The purpose of the talks, according to the Big Six, is to negotiate about Iran’s nuclear program. Iran, however, says the talks are to negotiate about world problems generally, everything from development programs in Latin America to global crime issues.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also wants to talk with Iran about its nuclear program. Those talks are now on the calendar. Iran has said that it is ready to discuss “any issues” in the upcoming three-day talks taking place in Tehran starting January 29.
“We are open to discuss any issues that the IAEA is interested to discuss, within the framework of its mandate, of course … I am optimistic that we will have a constructive, professional, technical meeting,” said Ali-Asghar Sultanieh, Iran’s chief envoy to the IAEA.
The IAEA is suspicious, however. It has repeatedly said that it wants access to locations, documents and personnel in Iran’s nuclear program that the IAEA has so far been barred from seeing.
But Sultanieh only talked in generalities. He did not address the IAEA’s concerns. He said the discussions would be aimed at “removing the ambiguities and concluding all this seemingly endless process.”
Amid all the talk about talks, the United States sent a message to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi.
Much of the coverage has been a distraction over whether President Obama wrote a letter or the State Department sent a diplomatic memo. The United States has refused to say exactly what it sent.
The most frequent Iranian version of events says Obama wrote a letter to the Supreme Leader that warned Iran against closing the Strait of Hormuz and then invited Iran to the negotiating table.
Asked whether a “letter” was sent, White House spokesman Jay Carney was unhelpful: “We have a number of ways to communicate our views to the Iranian government, and we have used those mechanisms regularly on a range of issues over the years.”
Asked the contents of the message, he said it was “broader” than press reports of the communication.
A source told Yahoo News on condition of anonymity that Obama’s message was a “standard diplomatic communication,” not a letter, relaying in private what the US has been saying in public about Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and repeating the offers Obama has often made to talk one-on-one with Iran. Khamenehi has, however, condemned one-on-one talks with the United States for years.