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March 9, 2010

Recep Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has cautioned against further UN Security Council sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme during a visit to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

“I don’t believe that any further sanctions will yield results,” Erdogan told journalists, adding that earlier rounds of sanctions ”have never yielded results.”

Turkey, which has good relations with its neighbour Iran, has offered to host an exchange of Iran’s low-enriched uranium (LEU) with 20 per cent enriched uranium to be supplied by world powers to Tehran as part of a UN-drafted deal.

Tehran and members of the UN Security Council are locked in a stalemate over the deal, which envisages shipping out Iran’s LEU to France and Russia for further conversion into higher-grade uranium.

Sanctions debate

Iran has said that its nuclear programme is purely for peaceful purposes and denies that it is trying to build a nuclear weapon.

in depth

But the US and other nations have been pressing the UN Security Council to impose a fourth set of sanctions against Iran on the issue.

The UN Security Council has said it is considering the matter after Yukiya Amano, the chief of the the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said last month that he could not verify that all of Tehran’s atomic activities were peaceful.

At a meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board in Vienna, the Austrian capital, in February, Amano said he could not “confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities”.

Amano also accused Iran of failing to co-operate with the IAEA and said he wanted Tehran to clarify issues about its nuclear programme.

“We would like to have a discussion with Iran to clarify the outstanding issues and issues that have a possible military dimension,” he said.

In October, Erdogan accused Western nations of hypocrisy in criticising Iran’s uranium enrichment programme while remaining silent on Israel, which is believed to have an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

He made the remarks during a vist to Tehran where he held bilateral talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.

Erdogan had told journalists travelling with him in Iran that the country’s nuclear programme “is an energy project with peaceful, humanitarian purposes”.

The same month he told The Guardian, a British newspaper, that Western powers were treating Iran unfairly and referred to Ahmadinejad as a “friend”.