European Union states have agreed to waive a visa ban on Iran's foreign minister so he can attend a security conference in Germany this weekend, but Tehran has yet to reply to the invitation, an EU official said. The minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, is included in a list of Iranian officials barred from entering the European Union as part of sanctions imposed to curb Iran's nuclear programme, which the West suspects is aimed at developing an atomic bomb.
Iran denies this, saying it is stockpiling enriched uranium only for civilian purposes including electricity. Salehi was formerly the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation. "The Germans agreed that he could go to the Munich conference, so in agreement with the member states, he's been taken off the list, but we haven't heard if he's actually going or not," an EU official said on Thursday.
UN Security Council diplomats in New York told Reuters it made sense to allow Salehi to travel to the annual, three-day Munich Security Conference, which begins on Friday, in the interest of continuing talks between Iran, the five permanent Security Council members and Germany on Iran's nuclear plans.
Salehi, they said, is a conservative and close to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, therefore a credible partner for dialogue who might wield more authority in negotiations than his predecessor Manouchehr Mottaki, who was fired by Ahmadinejad. Not everyone welcomed news of the sanctions waiver.
A senior Western diplomat said the nuclear negotiations were going nowhere and Salehi himself had made clear he was unwilling to compromise to resolve the long-running standoff between Iran and the six world powers. "It doesn't send a very strong signal to the world when the EU is willing to lift the travel ban for someone who has played a key role in Iran's nuclear weapons programme from the beginning and is doing nothing to help achieve a negotiated solution," the diplomat said.