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blackmailing India
By Siddharth Varadarajan
09/27/05 "The
Hindu" -- -- FOR ALL its pretensions to a permanent seat on the United Nations
Security Council, India on Saturday flunked its first real test as
a rising world power. Where no less than 11 countries smaller and
less powerful than us — Venezuela, Algeria, Brazil, Mexico,
Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Vietnam, and
Yemen — had the courage and good sense to join Russia and China
in refusing to endorse the U.S.-backed agenda of confrontation
with Iran, India threw in its lot with Washington and the European
troika.
Scared by a well-choreographed
bout of shadow boxing at the start of Congressional hearings
on the July 18 Indo-U.S.
nuclear deal, the Manmohan Singh Government convinced itself
that it had to side with Washington's unreasonable pressure on
Iran. In doing so, the Government has betrayed its own lack of
strategic confidence — this at a time when the fine print of the
nuclear deal is about to be negotiated and the slightest sign of
diplomatic weakness will be used by Washington to push the
envelope on issues like the scope
of international safeguards and inspections India must accept in
order to see the July 18 agreement through.
Moreover, the Government has chosen to go along with a
confrontationist move against Iran which undercuts a key legal
argument India has been making for 50 years to justify its own
nuclear programme — that countries can only be held to account
for international agreements they sign.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) gives Iran the right to
pursue the nuclear fuel cycle subject to safeguards. It gives Iran
the right to build a heavy water reactor. The Additional Protocol
Iran has signed specifies the kind of intrusive inspections it
must allow. But the International Atomic Energy Agency resolution
India voted for makes demands that go far, far beyond Iran's legal
obligations. This is a dangerous precedent for India to agree to
since this means the safeguards agreement and additional protocol
it has committed to sign with the IAEA also one day need not be
the final word on its legal obligations.
The vote India cast in the IAEA Board of Governors (BoG) was in
favour of a resolution finding Iran in
"non-compliance" with its safeguards obligations under
the NPT and expressing "the absence of confidence that Iran's
nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful purposes." The
finding is under two Articles, XII and III, of the IAEA Statute,
both of which mandate referral of the matter to the Security
Council. Unlike the referral under Article XII.C, which is more of
a procedural nature, the referral under III.B.4 invokes the
Security Council's responsibilities for maintaining international
peace and security and holds out a thinly veiled threat of
sanctions and other punitive measures.
In what is supposed to be a major "compromise," Britain,
France, and Germany (the E-3) dropped earlier language stipulating
that the referral to the Security Council should be immediate. The
timing of this referral has been left to a future BoG meeting,
presumably the one that will be convened in November. The Indian
Government, in
justifying its decision to back the resolution, has cited this
two-step approach as a big concession. Indian officials claim this
delay provides the time and space needed for dialogue and
diplomacy to work, a claim of extraordinary naivety and even
double-speak. First, Saturday's resolution is more likely to close
the door on dialogue than re-open it since it demands Iran
surrender even more of its rights under the NPT than ever before.
Secondly, the U.S. itself did not necessarily want an immediate
referral because there is little practical significance to
dragging Iran before the UNSC where China and Russia would
exercise their veto. What it really wanted was for the
international community to recognise Iran's civilian nuclear
energy programme as a threat to international peace and security
requiring potentially endless "special verification"
inspections, which go far beyond that required under the normal
safeguards agreement and Additional Protocol. Armed with this
broad endorsement, Washington can now choose the time and place
for the political — and even military — escalation that is
surely in the offing.
Given the composition of the BoG, securing a majority had never
been an issue for the U.S. and its allies. But in the absence of
consensus, which was an impossibility anyway, engineering India's
defection from the ranks of the developing countries was crucial.
The U.S. needed to undercut the charge that the West was ganging
up on the Third World in denying Iran the right to nuclear fuel
cycle-related facilities. Winning over Ecuador, Peru, Ghana, and
Singapore was not good enough since these are not countries known
for the independence of their foreign policy. The U.S. needed
India to provide a cover of credibility for the unreasonable
indictment against Iran and the Manmohan Singh Government happily
went along. That is why U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas
Burns has
hailed India's vote as "a blow to Iran's attempt to turn
this into a developed world versus developing world debate."
Of all the demands the IAEA resolution makes, three are highly
problematic and ultra vires. First, it says Iran must
implement "transparency measures ... which extend beyond the
formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional
Protocol." Calling Iran a "special verification
case," the BoG said this requires an expansion in the
"limited" legal authority of the IAEA to conduct
inspections. Specifically, this must include "access to
individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual use
equipment, certain military owned workshops and research and
development locations." In this way, the road has been
cleared for an Inspection Raj of the UNSCOM/UNMOVIC type, which,
even after physically checking every possible location in Iraq
several times over, never had the ability to say Baghdad possessed
no weapons of mass destruction. The resolution's demand for access
to individuals is also a bit rich, considering that the source of
the technology Iran is suspected of possessing — A.Q. Khan —
is sitting pretty in Pakistan, beyond
the reach of IAEA inspectors.
Secondly, Iran has been told to resume the suspension of
enrichment-related and reprocessing activity. Unlike all previous
resolutions of the BoG which called on Iran to suspend its
enrichment, this resolution makes no explicit mention of the
voluntary, non-legally binding nature of Iran's commitment to
suspend those activities. By this subtle act of elision, a
voluntary, non-legally binding undertaking is being elevated to
the status of a legally binding commitment. Thirdly, the
resolution says Iran must "reconsider the construction of a
research reactor moderated by heavy water." This is a new and
illegal demand that did not figure in the last
resolution passed by the BoG on August 11, 2005, and
represents a further shift of the goalpost.
The irony of the Indian capitulation on Iran is that its display
of political weakness comes at a time when the U.S. has finally
become aware of India's strategic weight and significance and is attempting
desperately to harness these for its own ends.
When President George W. Bush offered Dr. Manmohan Singh civilian
nuclear cooperation, he did so in full knowledge that India has
tended to side with the rest of the developing world on the
question of Iran. Either his decision to support India's nuclear
industry was taken independently of the Iran equation or it was
conditional on New Delhi ditching Tehran both as a source of
energy security and as a
conduit for the integration of India and Central Asia. If the
former is the case, the Manmohan Singh Government had nothing to
fear from sticking to its earlier stand of "consensus"
in the IAEA BoG. And if it was the latter, then surely this
amounts to a hidden — and unacceptable — cost India is now
being forced to pay in order to see the nuclear deal through.
Any deal or partnership that hangs on such a slender thread, which
attempts forcibly to rewrite India's strategic equations and
undermines the country's strategic autonomy cannot possibly be in
the national interest. Nuclear power of the kind that might flow
from this deal will never be a substitute for hydrocarbons in the
medium-term. Even in the long-term, India will depend on gas
imports from Iran and Central Asia, preferably via pipeline.
If not today, then five years from now, the logic of India's
economic growth will compel a rewriting of the rules of
international nuclear commerce for the country — this time not
as a concession or favour from the U.S. but as the product of
objective market forces. By blackmailing India into voting against
Iran, the U.S. hopes to undermine Indo-Iranian economic relations
to such an extent that New Delhi becomes a stakeholder in the
drive for "regime change" there. How much the world has
changed in a year. A country that once condemned the invasion of
Iraq and refused to send its soldiers there is today in danger of
becoming an accessory to the strangulation and targeting of Iran.
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