Is Iran ready for a Nuclear Deal?

The following online news article “Some See Iran as Ready for Nuclear Deal” from the New York Times by Michael Slackman questions whether Iran is ready for a nuclear deal. It’s about time and let’s hope so.

“RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Iran says it has no plans to build nuclear weapons. Western nations say they do not believe Iran and periodically release intelligence reports that they say prove Iran has been working on building a bomb.

Hassan Rowhani, center, chief nuclear negotiator for Iran, in 2005, the year his speech on Iran’s program was published.  For years, that has been the point of contention in an intractable international dispute.

But as the United States and its Western allies prepare for a second round of direct negotiations with Tehran this month, that may no longer be the central question. The more pertinent point, Iran experts and regional analysts say, is that Iran finally may be ready to make a deal.

The analysts cite a confluence of factors, from Iran’s internal political crisis to the change in leadership in Washington, and one overriding point: Iran’s leadership may have achieved much of what it set out to accomplish when it stepped up its clandestine nuclear program in 1999.

In contentious, high-stakes negotiations, deals are possible when both sides have a chance to declare victory, and that point may have been reached.

“If the Iranian endgame is to keep enrichment, and if the United States’ endgame is to make sure there are no nuclear weapons in Iran, then it can be a win-win,” said Trita Parsi, author of a book on Iran and president of the National Iranian American Council, an independent advocacy group in Washington. “Those who have been criticizing the administration for compromising or giving Iran a concession, they are wrong. It is not a concession to adjust to an unchanging reality.”

For Iran, this is not exactly about compromising — which it has shown little appetite for — as much as cooperating. For the West, it is not about winning concessions but about developing verifiable assurances that Iran is not producing weapons.

“I think the Iranians are simply in no mood to accept any serious limits on the expansion of their program,” said Flynt Leverett, director of the Iran Project at the New America Foundation. “From their point of view, they already suspended enrichment for almost two years, from 2003 to 2005, and from their perspective, they got nothing for that and they’re not going to do that again.”

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Turkey attacks China ‘genocide’

In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”  This definition comes from Wikipedia online.  I have presented this definition in light of the news events happening in China’s Xinjian region.  This news story comes from the BBC news. Genocide of any distinct group whether it be Kurds, Armenians, Rwanda’s Tutsis, Jews to name a few, is  indeed, a crime against humanity and democracy.

“Turkey’s prime minister has described ethnic violence in China’s Xinjiang region as “a kind of genocide”.
“There is no other way of commenting on this event,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

The death toll from the violence there has now risen from 156 to 184, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reports. More than 1,000 people were injured.  Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, shares linguistic and religious links with the Uighurs in China’s western-most region.

“The event taking place in China is a kind of genocide,” Mr Erdogan told reporters in Turkey’s capital, Ankara.
“There are atrocities there, hundreds of people have been killed and 1,000 hurt. We have difficulty understanding how China’s leadership can remain a spectator in the face of these events.”

The Turkish premier also urged Beijing to “address the question of human rights and do what is necessary to prosecute the guilty”.

Mr Erdogan’s comments came a day after Turkish Trade and Industry Minister Nihat Ergun urged Turks to boycott Chinese goods. But it said that of the 184 people who died, 137 were Han Chinese.

Earlier on Friday, the Chinese authorities reimposed a night-time curfew in Urumqi. The curfew had been suspended for two days after officials said they had the city under control. Mosques in the city were ordered to remain closed on Friday and notices were posted instructing people to stay at home to worship.

But at least two opened after crowds of Uighurs gathered outside and demanded to be allowed in to pray on the holiest day of the week in Islam.

“We decided to open the mosque because so many people had gathered. We did not want an incident,” a policeman outside the White Mosque in a Uighur neighbourhood told the AP news agency.

After the prayers, riot police punched and kicked a small group of Uighurs protesters, who demanded the release of men detained after last Sunday’s violence, the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville says.

Meanwhile, the city’s main bus station was reported to be crowded with people trying to escape the unrest.

The violence began on Sunday when a Uighur rally to protest against a deadly brawl between Uighurs and Han Chinese several weeks ago in a toy factory in southern Guangdong province turned violent.

Tensions have been growing in Xinjiang for many years, as Han migrants have poured into the region, where the Uighur minority is concentrated.

Many Uighurs feel economic growth has bypassed them and complain of discrimination and diminished opportunities.”

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