Iran delays nuke negotiations until Aug

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Md. Tabarak Hossain Bhuiyan

Tehran, June 29 (Agencies): Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his country will freeze nuclear talks with world powers until August in a bid to 'punish' the West.
Iran also said Tuesday its decision to delay talks for two months relates only to its overall atomic programme and is not part of negotiations on a nuclear fuel agreement.
Mr. Ahmadinejad said Iran is postponing nuclear talks because the West issued a Security Council resolution against it, supposedly to give them the upper hand in negotiations.
Calling the UN resolution immoral, he said the postponement is intended to "punish the West so they learn how to speak properly with other nations."
At a press conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad also labelled the United States, along with Israel and Great Britain as Iran's chief "enemy."
He says the hope of President Barack Obama would "change" the nature of relations between Iran and the United States have been dashed.
UN Security Council members may have voted for sanctions against Iran, but that they still are not considered to be enemies of his country, he adds.
The Iranian president says he still considers Russia and China to be 'friendly' states. He claims they supported the recent, new sanctions resolution against his country because of the importance of their ties with the United States.
Mr. Ahmadinejad also insisted that he wants Brazil and Turkey to negotiate alongside his country in fuel-swap negotiations, against the United States, France and Russia, which he says have played an adversarial role in past talks.
He said the talks should be based on a fuel-swap deal mediated last month by Brazil and Turkey.
Foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters the issue of Iran's controversial uranium enrichment programme is separate from that of a proposed swap deal that would ensure a fuel supply for the Tehran research reactor.
In another deevlopment, Hossein Mousavian, a former lead Iranian nuclear negotiator, has taken up residence at Princeton University, marking the highest-ranking member of Tehran's political elite to relocate to the US since last year's political uprising against the president.