“If indeed Iran is trying to stall, it’s not going to work. The international community has said that we need to get an answer, an indication of where Iran is going with this”, Rice told reporters at a joint press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul in Washington, DC.
“What was to happen today was there was to be a meeting of the Iranians with [European Union”> High Representative [Javier”> Solana. We will see what takes place over the next couple of days”, she said.
Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani postponed his meeting in Brussels with Solana on Wednesday in what EU diplomats said was out of anger that the leader of Iran’s main opposition coalition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) had attended a session of the European Parliament (EP) in Strasbourg.
At a news conference at the EP, Maryam Rajavi announced that she had cancelled plans to meet parliamentary groups in order to avoid giving the Iranian authorities an excuse to stop the nuclear talks, the news agency Reuters reported.
“I wish to remove any pretext that the mullahs might have and I wish to make negotiations possible for the international community, and that is why I have asked that the meetings be deferred”, she told journalists.
Rajavi’s group was the first to publish details of Iran’s clandestine nuclear enrichment program in 2002.
Rice told journalists, “We need to know if the path of negotiation is open or not. It is really incumbent on Iran now to take what is a very good [offer”> and respond to it”.
“And so I will, in fact, be talking to my colleagues a little bit later today, but I can assure you that we still intend to have a substantive response from Iran before the middle of July when the heads of state will meet in St. Petersburg. It simply makes sense for the world to have some kind of indication of whether Iran intends to pursue the negotiated track or not”, she said.
