Muted media response to Iran nuclear talks

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili participated in the talks

Media in the Middle East, Russia and China reacted in a subdued manner on Thursday and Friday to the relatively positive conclusion to the latest nuclear talks between Iran and six major powers in Geneva. The broad consensus was that progress had been made, and that tougher sanctions against Iran were a more real possibility given a perceived rapprochement between the United States and Russia.

IRAN

Media reaction in Iran was muted. Newspapers do not usually appear on Friday, and the only major exception - the state-run Arabic-language Al-Vefagh - made no editorial comment on the talks. Caution marked reporting by the official broadcast media and the moderate news agencies ILNA and Mehr, with opinion restricted to quiet optimism in the former or, on the agencies, at worst a sense of an Iranian retreat. In the broadcast media, Tehran Friday Prayer Leader Hojjat ol-Eslam Kazem Seddiqi said Iran had no intention of attacking any countries, and that its missile programme was purely for defensive purposes. His remarks were broadcast live by state-run Iranian radio.

Official media reaction had also been restrained on 1 October, ranging from subdued reporting by the state news agency IRNA to cautious optimistism in an Iran newspaper editorial and Fars news agency coverage. The overall tenor of reporting and comment in the run-up to the talks had been sceptical. In the evening the Iranian TV news channel carried chief negotiator Sa'id Jalili's news conference live from Geneva, in which he said the talks had been positive and would continue. This was also carried on Iran's international English-language Press TV and Arabic-language Al-Alam TV.

RUSSIA

The Russian broadcast media made little comment on the talks, and did not even report it among their main stories on 2 October. State television channels on 1 October reported the reaction of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other officials, who sent out messages that ranged from the hopeful to the cautious. The officials did not comment on reports that Russia was prepared to enrich Iran's uranium, and the broadcast media in general refrained from comment.

The most extensive remarks by any official to be broadcast were those of the chairman of the parliamentary International Affairs Committee, Konstantin Kosachev. He told state-owned Russian news channel Vesti TV on the evening of 1 October that unless Iran stopped presenting the international community with "surprises" about its nuclear programme and joined a collective system of international security it might face sanctions. "Time after time Iran presents the international community with surprises: here is a new enrichment programme, here are new centrifuges, here are new missiles and their tests and so on and so forth... Either Iran voluntarily agrees to participate in an international system of collective security like that or, alas, we shall have to persuade Iran to do that, possibly, if the worst comes to the worst, through sanctions". Kosachev welcomed the progress at the talks, and attributed this to the change in the US approach from the "excessively aggressive, attacking, categorical actions of the previous Bush administration".

Press comment was extensive and generally positive. An article by Vladimir Vorobyev in the official daily newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta praised the outcome of the talks and attributed progress to the "USA having radically changed its approach". He warned Iran that it faced further UN Security Council sanctions if it did not cooperate - an indication that the author thought neither Russia nor China would veto such measures: "If the talks fail, significantly tougher sanctions are sure to follow and they will most likely be approved at the level of the UN Security Council". Vorobyev wrote that Iran had to make "no sacrifices" in order to avoid sanctions.

Igor Kryuchkov in the privately-owned daily Gazeta described the talks as a "breakthrough". Alekdsandr Gabuyev in the heavyweight liberal daily Kommersant was even more positive, writing that there were "for the first time no irreconcilable differences in the 5+1 group". He thought Russia and the USA had achieved consensus on dialogue with Iran backed by the threat of "tougher sanctions as a last resort" at the meeting between Presidents Dmitriy Medvedev and Barack Obama in New York in September. Like Vorobyev, he believed that China would not veto sanctions and that Iran now realized this. Gabuyev wrote that Iran's willingness to send some low-enriched uranium produced in Iran to a third country for further enrichment was the "idea at the centre of the Geneva talks".

Russian disarmament analyst Aleksandr Pikayev sounded a more cautious note in the popular Moscow daily Moskovskiy Komsomolets. He wrote that Obama had effectively "turned the group of six into the group of seven" by giving Iran a role, but did not however think that this would allow the USA to halt Tehran's nuclear programme. Pikayev wrote that direct talks with Tehran were "five years overdue" and that the USA was "now acting from a position of weakness". He thought the USA needed Iran to help it leave Iraq with minimal losses, and would soften its stance accordingly.

CHINA

The media in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan concentrated on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Communist People's Republic, and provided no comment on the Geneva talks. A report by the official news agency Xinhua reported China's "welcome for progress made in the international talks". It quoted disarmament official Cheng Jingye, who represented China at the talks, as saying that Beijing "called on the parties to continue strengthening diplomatic efforts in pursuit of a comprehensive solution to the Iranian nuclear issue".

ARAB MEDIA

The pan-Arab satellite television channels all led their bulletins on 2 October with the conclusion of the Geneva talks. Saudi-funded Al-Arabiya led with news of possible sanctions and said that the USA was putting more pressure on Iran. The tone of its reporting was very anti-Tehran, in contrast to Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera's view of the talks as "constructive". Iran's Arabic-language Al-Alam international channel said all parties were "satisfied with the progress of the talks", adding that President Obama had supported "Iran's right to peaceful nuclear energy".

The previous day Al-Alam had led with the Geneva talks and reported that there were "Franco-British attempts to control the agenda". The channel maintained extensive coverage of the talks throughout the day, hosting the official Arabic spokesman for the British Foreign Office. He told the channel that there was "exaggeration in the presentation of British reservations". Al-Jazeera's reporter in Geneva said there was expected to be "heavy pressure" on Iran, adding that the USA wanted an answer to the question "will Iran stop its nuclear programme?" He said some observers thought Iran was counting on splits within the 5+1 group. The channel aired an exclusive interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki in the evening, along with a critical commentary by former US State Department adviser.

London-based pan-Arab newspapers gave prominence to the talks in their reports, with a general emphasis on the remaining threat of sanctions. The two Saudi-owned papers Al-Hayat and Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported Iran's agreement to ship uranium to a third country as a sign of progress, but the latter tempered this with the view of some Iranian reformers that possible sanctions might lead to more oppression. The Arab nationalist Al-Quds Al-Arabi and pro-Libyan Al-Arab al-Alamiyah emphasized the timetable in which talks had to succeed before the USA opted for tougher sanctions.

Two commentaries in Al-Hayat weighed the potential price of failure in the talks. Paul Salim wrote that the "Middle East may well enter a new phase of dangerous military confrontations" if both the Iranian and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations broke down. Raghidah Dargham wrote that Iran was counting on its negotiating skill to buy time, adding that Tehran was nonetheless genuinely afraid of oil sanctions. She thought sanctions worried Tehran not because of the threat to its domestic economy and political stability but rather to its ability to buy influence abroad by "funding foreign countries in times of financial crises".

The editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Abd-al-Bari Atwan, thought Iran had emerged the victor at the talks. "Put simply, the Iranian negotiator returned the ball to the American court once again and, rubbing his hands with glee, is expecting to win the first round of the Geneva talks in order to gain more time to continue his efforts to neutralize both the Chinese and Russian governments over sanctions and to complicate the Obama administration's mission in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Iranian magician still has a trick up his sleeve," he wrote. He also thought that Iran had used the opportunity to put universal nuclear disarmament on the international agenda.

In the Middle East, Arabic press comment on the Geneva talks was sparse. Three writers agreed that Iran had wrung concessions from the 5+1 group. In Lebanon, Subhi Ghandur wrote in the left-wing Al-Safir that Obama had tacitly realized that sanctions could not resolve the Iranian nuclear issue and had opted for direct talks - the alternative being a war that would have unwelcome military, political and economic repercussions for the USA. In the centre-ground Lebanese newspaper Al-Anwar, Rafiq al-Khuri wrote that the Geneva talks had in fact brought the West no benefit as "Iran knows what the West wants and its weaknesses, while the West does not know all that Tehran possesses with regards to the nuclear programme or even its level of strategic decisions". He wrote that Iran perceived Western fear and confusion about any military option, along with bemusement at the internal workings of the Iranian government, and was exploiting this.

A commentary by Mahmud Murad in Egypt's main pro-government newspaper Al-Ahram restated a common line of argument in the Arab and Iranian media, namely that the UN, USA and the West in general apply "double standards" in condemning the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programmes while saying nothing about Israel's presumed arsenal of nuclear weapons. Murad included Russia among the alleged practitioners of double standards, with reference to President Medvedev's rapprochement with the USA over Iran.

ISRAEL

The Israeli media were preoccupied with domestic news, but two press commentaries were not optimistic about prospects for halting Iran's nuclear programme. Alex Fishman wrote in the largest-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot that it was good to see that the "enlightened world has not totally missed the train" about Iran's programme, but concluded that the only guarantee of stopping Tehran's acquisition of nuclear capability was by "making the necessary preparations for the destruction of the installations". He called on Israel to increase spending on a possible attack system and civil defence, adding that Iran had probably decided that the addition of 1.5bn shekels to the Israeli security budget this week was intended for that purpose.

Yossi Melman in the liberal broadsheet Ha'aretz was also pessimistic, writing that "Obama changed his country's policy, without preconditions, but thus far Iran has not responded with a gesture of its own". He thought that Russia and China would fail to support the only measures against Iran that would genuinely harm it, namely oil-industry sanctions, and that Iran's hardline post-election government had proved that "punishment does not deter it". Like Fishman, he wrote that any failure of the Geneva process would mean either allowing the "ayatollahs in Tehran" to develop nuclear weapons or a "military operation to cause interference and delay".

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