|
|
|
Join UANI
Top
Stories
Reuters:
"Iran's oil exports have stayed above levels allowed under Western
sanctions for a fifth month, according to sources who track tanker
movements, in a further sign that a deal to ease some restrictions is
helping Tehran sell more crude. Under the deal, Iran's exports are
supposed to be held at an average 1 million bpd for the six months to
July 20. But shipments to Asia have topped that level at least since
November, according to ship tracking data. The Obama administration
believes that exports will fall in coming months and on average will fall
to the 1 million bpd level stipulated by the interim agreement which went
into effect on January 20. Iran's crude exports have averaged 1.3 million
barrels per day (bpd) in March, down from 1.4 million bpd in February,
said one of the sources. That is still an elevated rate, as imports of
Iranian oil in 2013 averaged 1.1 million bpd. A second tanker tracking
source said Iranian crude exports, excluding to Japan, reached 1.28
million bpd in March and included sales to top buyers such as China and
India as well as South Korea, Turkey and Tehran's major ally Syria. That
points to steady Iranian shipments overall, he added." http://t.uani.com/NYMWZm
RFE/RL:
"Rights group Amnesty International says Iran and Iraq were responsible
for a 'sharp global spike' in executions last year. Salil Shetty,
Amnesty's Secretary-General, said the two states had indulged in a
'virtual killing spree.' The findings of the annual report on the death
penalty were presented on March 26 in London by Audrey Gaughran, director
of global issues for Amnesty International. 'Almost 100 more people were
put to death in 2013 compared to 2012. The countries responsible for that
sharp spike are largely Iran and Iraq,' said Gaughran... In Iran,
officially acknowledged executions had risen to at least 369 in 2013 --
from at least 314 in 2012, but Amnesty said at least another 335
executions had been reported to them by sources. Gaughran said Hassan
Rohani's presidency had not had any positive impact toward abolishing the
death penalty. 'We haven't seen any positive developments since the new
president came into office in relation to the death penalty,' said
Gaughran. 'In fact we have seen, as this report highlights, an increase
in executions in Iran this year. We are deeply concerned by a number of
factors around those executions, including the fact that many of the
trials are grossly unfair trials. Death sentences are given out for drug
related offenses.'" http://t.uani.com/OXEV87
Reuters:
"Iran aims to increase its gasoline imports over the next year, a
senior Iranian oil official said on Thursday, as the country has stopped
using domestic petrochemical plants to produce the fuel... 'Iran will
triple gasoline imports in the next Iranian calendar year,' Iran's semi-official
Mehr news agency quoted the head of the National Iranian Oil Products
Distribution Company, Mostafa Kashkouli, as saying on March 4. 'It will
be around 11 million litres.' ... The National Iranian Oil Co.'s director
of international affairs in 2010, Ali Asghar Arshi, said Iran had become
self-sufficient in producing gasoline and also other top oil ministry
officials were quoted by Iranian media as saying that 'Iran won't have to
rely on imports anymore.' Many analysts were skeptical, saying it was
part of the country's 'political and psychological' propaganda to cope
with sanctions." http://t.uani.com/1jQ72j2
Nuclear Program & Negotiations
Al-Monitor:
"A conservative Iranian analyst has said that the upper echelon of
the political system had made the decision before the 2013 elections to address
Iran's disagreements with the international community and needed someone
with Hassan Rouhani's background to implement the necessary policies. 'I
think the system had the intention to make a calculated move in the field
of international engagement,' Amir Mohebbian, a political analyst and
editor of Arya News, told Mosallas magazine. 'Neither [Mahmoud]
Ahmadinejad could play this role, nor was it expedient for this to fall
in the hands of the Reformists, who do not have the strength for a
project this important. Naturally, Rouhani, with his experience and his
particular security perspective, had the necessary skill for this
matter.'" http://t.uani.com/1eUoTpc
Sanctions
Enforcement & Impact
FT:
"Washington is 'bullying' UK banks into refusing to support legal
exports to Iran, costing British companies hundreds of millions of pounds
in lost sales, senior politicians claimed at Westminster on Wednesday.
While US exports to Iran have been rising, Washington is suspected by
British parliamentarians of using extraterritorial threats to hinder UK
companies wanting to legally export food, pharmaceuticals and medical
devices to Iran. Jack Straw, the former Labour foreign secretary, and
Norman Lamont, former Tory chancellor, claim Washington's behaviour is a direct
challenge to British sovereignty. 'The US Congress and government would
not tolerate this for a moment were the situation reversed,' Mr Straw
said. Lord Lamont said Britain 'should not be bullied by the American
authorities.'" http://t.uani.com/1eUpQh8
Terrorism
WSJ:
"Osama bin Laden's son-in-law was found guilty of conspiring to kill
Americans and of providing material support to terrorists, one of the
most prominent al Qaeda operatives to be convicted in a U.S. civilian
court... Mr. Abu Ghaith fled Afghanistan in April 2002 to Iran, where he
was detained along with senior al Qaeda leaders. While in Iran, he
married bin Laden's daughter, Fatima, as his second wife. In February
2013, Mr. Abu Ghaith left Iran for Turkey, where he was arrested by Jordanian
authorities and handed off to U.S. law enforcement on a layover in
Amman." http://t.uani.com/1dviToo
Domestic
Politics
Reuters:
"Looming fuel price rises in Iran will be the first major test of
President Hassan Rouhani's ability to retain public support in the face
of attacks from his hardline rivals... He has promised more social
freedoms and repaired some of the economic damage of the sanctions; the
rial currency has stabilized and sky-high inflation has started to come
down. But this could be threatened if Rouhani's government mishandles
planned cuts in the massive state subsidies which keep domestic prices of
gasoline and other fuels far below global levels. The cuts are a key part
of Rouhani's efforts to reform the economy after years of erratic management
under his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But they will be painful for
many Iranians and therefore eat into Rouhani's political capital, which
he needs to overcome domestic resistance to a nuclear deal. 'People voted
for Rouhani in the hope that he would decrease their living costs, not
increase them,' said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace in the United States." http://t.uani.com/1loybhv
Foreign Affairs
AP:
"In his first visit to Afghanistan as Iran's president, Hassan
Rouhani called for regional unity Thursday as regional leaders celebrated
the Persian New Year in Kabul. Rouhani is visiting at a crucial time for
Afghanistan, with national elections being held in just over a week and
most U.S. and allied troops withdrawing by year's end. With Western
influence diminishing in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and
other countries are vying to fill the vacuum. The Iranian leader,
accompanied by his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, also met
separately with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Tajik President Emomali
Rahmon for a summit of Farsi-speaking countries to discuss ways to
increase cooperation between their three countries, according to the
semiofficial Fars news agency. Dari, a dialect of Farsi, and Pashto are
the official languages of Afghanistan." http://t.uani.com/1dQov7w
Opinion &
Analysis
Michael Doran in
Mosaic: "But the real consequences of the Syria
debacle can be seen with respect to Iran. If the Iranians understand one
thing, the president assured Jeffrey Goldberg, it's that, if cornered, he
will resort to military force to stop them from acquiring a nuclear
weapon. But, just as in Syria, Obama's primary goal in Iran is to avoid
ever being cornered. Gary Samore, a former Obama White House official,
has expressed it with admirable clarity: 'Our strategy is to buy time.'
Unfortunately, time does not come cheap. Although the president insists
that a policy of delaying the arrival of an Iranian nuclear bomb is
perfectly consistent with a policy of preventing its arrival altogether,
in fact the two aims are largely incompatible. Delay comes at the cost of
prevention. Stopping Iran's march toward nuclear capability would require
instilling in Ali Khamenei the certain knowledge that if he fails to drop
his program, he will suffer economic ruin, or a devastating military
attack, or both. To be successful, therefore, the interim diplomacy must
be carried out under a hard deadline. The Iranians must be left in no
doubt whatsoever that failure to reach a deal by a date certain will
leave them in a much worse position than before the negotiations ever
started. Obama's diplomacy fails this elementary test. Rather than
forcing Khamenei to make a hard choice, the 'interim deal' struck in Geneva
last November explicitly offers him an escape route: endless
negotiations. According to the terms of that deal, diplomacy can be
extended indefinitely. Although defenders of the administration downplay
the significance of this fact, claiming that the Iranian program is
'frozen' during the period of negotiations, that claim is false. The
program advances even as the diplomats haggle. For one thing, the interim
deal is silent on ballistic missiles and warheads, two key components of
any nuclear program. For another thing, although the deal does extract
concessions on centrifuges and enrichment, even in these areas the
Iranians are still moving forward. In recent congressional testimony,
David Albright, a leading expert on counter-proliferation, pointed to a
major loophole in the agreement that allows continued 'research and
development' on second-generation centrifuges. Since, he explains, these
so-called IR-2Ms are more efficient than the first-generation machines
currently in operation, 'At the end of the interim period Iran is likely
to be far better positioned to deploy reliable IR-2m centrifuges on a
mass scale at its enrichment plants. This gain would allow Iran to make
up for time lost more quickly.' Over the next months, we can expect
Khamenei's negotiators to test Obama's red lines. What then? If the
president finds himself compelled to assume a firm posture, as he did
with Syria last fall, the Iranians might present him with a fig leaf in
the form of a revamped interim deal. For example, they might agree to
dismantle first-generation centrifuges in return for the right to replace
them with IR-2Ms, thereby increasing the program's overall capacity to
enrich uranium with a decreased number of centrifuges. Would Obama reject
such a deal and launch a military strike, or would he embrace it in order
to buy more time? Odds are, he'd embrace it. Congress would certainly
balk, but the big showdown between Capitol Hill and the White House would
not come, if ever, until after this year's mid-term elections, by which
time the president will be less constrained by domestic critics. In
addition, he could deal with those critics as his staffers did when
November's interim deal was first announced, painting dissenters in
Congress as warmongers and subtly suggesting that they are dancing to the
tune of a foreign power (i.e., Israel). At the same time, the president
could turn to the American people and proclaim, 'Just as I forced Assad
to give up chemical weapons, I have now compelled Iran to destroy nuclear
infrastructure.' In brief, it is undoubtedly the case that Obama's
policies have weakened the deterrent credibility of the United States
everywhere. While many are now decrying the results of that weakness in
the case of Ukraine, its effects are even more directly visible, and more
alarming, in the case of Iran. Maybe, just maybe, the president will keep
his promise to prevent Iran from going nuclear on his watch. But the
emphasis is entirely on the last phrase-on his watch. That's very
different from a policy aimed at preventing Iran from going nuclear,
period. Meanwhile, interim deal or no interim deal, Tehran, as aware of
American election cycles as is Barack Obama himself, steadily moves
toward a point within a hair's breadth of an undetectable breakout
capability." http://t.uani.com/1gFwMkq
Ephraim Asculai
& Emily B. Landau in INSS: "The claim by US
negotiator Wendy Sherman that 'verification' is the key element in
ensuring that the Iranian nuclear program is and remains completely
peaceful has resonated in a string of US statements in the same vein,
aimed to reassure skeptics that the United States will be able to detect
and deal in a timely manner with an Iranian breakout to nuclear weapons.
However, while verification is no doubt an essential component of any comprehensive
deal with Iran, it should not be regarded as the linchpin of a successful
agreement. Placing so much weight on successful verification is a
dangerous proposition, and raises the concern that the P5+1 may be
willing to entertain a deal that does not dismantle all the key
components of Iran's program that support military ambitions. The role of
verification is to ensure that Iran upholds its commitment to remain
non-nuclear, but verification is no substitute for the commitment
itself... The true key to a successful deal with Iran is not
verification; it is, rather, clear indication that Iran has opted to
abandon its military nuclear ambitions. If Iran decides to do so, the
problematic aspects of its program would be rendered unnecessary. Moreover,
verification, while helpful, is not guaranteed to stop Iran in time. The
history of intelligence in general, and of verification in particular, is
replete with instances of failure. The limitations inherent in
verification attempts as well as past experience in actual verification
missions demand extreme caution in this regard. The role of verification
is to ensure that Iran upholds its commitment to remain non-nuclear, but
verification is no substitute for the commitment itself. In order to
convince Iran to back away from its military intentions, the leverage
that accrues from strong international pressure is critical. In addition,
it must be made fully clear that for decades Iran has been working on a
military nuclear program while cheating on its NPT commitment. Iran's
current and consistent narrative is that it does not have, and never had,
military nuclear ambitions. Yet Iran cannot be allowed to hold onto the
claim that it has done no wrong; otherwise it can say that it is being
required to back away from something that does not exist. As such,
clarifying what is known as the Possible Military Dimensions (PMD) of
Iran's nuclear program must be an integral part of any comprehensive
deal. On this critical PMD issue, Sherman has not communicated a determined,
unequivocal US stance... Exaggerated and unwarranted expectations
regarding the ability of the IAEA to verify Iranian compliance with a
nuclear deal could end in disaster. The only true basis for a
comprehensive deal with Iran is if it owns up to its military program and
agrees to dismantle - as Assad did in the chemical realm last summer.
Excessive reliance on verification as the key to a successful deal is an
illusion. There is no basis in reality for the expectation that
verification and intelligence - which are not actions in and of
themselves, but only the basis upon which international actors can then
take action - will enable these actors to coordinate and respond to an
Iranian breakout in time." http://t.uani.com/1hx5aJj
Mansour Osanlou in
ICHRI: "As an Iranian labor activist, I have always
looked for models that my country can follow to improve. Striking a
balance between worker rights, economic developments, international
trade, and vital social-programs is indeed no easy task, especially for countries
with troubled pasts. Charged with unprecedented challenges after
transitioning to a democracy in 1985, Brazil has pleasantly surprised the
world. Brazil today is a global player that has become a model for
emerging states like Iran to follow, particularly with regards to labor
rights and human rights. As a labor organizer and head of the Tehran Bus
Drivers Union, I am well aware of the obstacles workers face in Iran. For
most Iranians, wages are dangerously low, health and safety in the
workplace is non-existent, and needed social programs are being slashed.
Yet, in Iran, advocating for the rights workers and the poor is out of
the question. Even contemplating organizing union meetings or engaging in
strikes, for example, can bring about devastating consequences. I know
this from personal experience. I was imprisoned for more than five years.
I was physically tortured, and threatened with death and rape. My wife
and children were harassed, jailed, and abused. My alleged crime:
advocating for higher wages for bus drivers. Can a country progress when
its government doesn't tolerate the divergent views of its own citizens?
Can ordinary Iranians find dignity in work when they can't advocate for
better conditions? Contrary to the new government's public relations
efforts, the human rights situation has not improved since President
Hassan Rouhani assumed office eight months ago. And for workers, things
are bleak. The new government has set a minimum wages that cover only a
fourth of what working families actually need to sustain their
livelihoods. On average, five workers die everyday in unsafe construction
sites and factories. Workers that complain can be called into 'Herasat
(Security) Offices' - found in most public companies, technical guilds,
and all universities, and staffed by representatives of the Ministry of
Intelligence - and dismissed from their jobs. And while recent sanctions
have certainly hurt the Iranian economy, most of these and other
anti-worker policies pre-date sanctions. Just a couple of weeks ago, two
workers from the Tehran Bus Company who were seeking to reopen the
company's union were arrested. Hassan Saedi and Morteza Komsari had
carried out informal meetings where they taught workers the basics of
advocacy, highlighted the rights they were entitled to, and gathered
signatures for a petition advocating for the union's reopening. After
collecting over 2,000 signatures, they handed their petition over to the
Iranian Ministry of Labor. A week later, they were arrested without any
real explanation and amid accusations of 'acting against public order and
national security'. Whereas Iran continues to take steps backwards,
Brazil has made significant improvements over the last decade. As a child
worker himself and a member of the ABC metalworkers union, former
president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva carried out significant reforms and
advocated for the dignity of workers. Victories like when Lula's
government's successfully secured wage increases for 40,000 São Paulo
metalworkers in 2010 have become a source of inspiration for us in the
Iranian labor movement and a road map of where we can go. Iranian workers
don't just need Brazil to be a role model, however. Brazil must also be
an ally in the pursuit of human rights." http://t.uani.com/1hdIamk
|
|
Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear
Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the
Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive
media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with
discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please
email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com
United Against Nuclear
Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a
commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a
regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons. UANI is an
issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own
interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of
nuclear weapons.
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment