VIENNA It was hard to miss the dozens of empty chairs and forlorn-looking tables at the shiny new communications center, all of it set up by the Austrian Foreign Ministry near UN headquarters in Vienna for reporters covering the nuclear talks with Iran.In the three rounds of talks on an interim agreement between Iran and the six world powers, which took place in October and November last year in Geneva, you couldnt stick a pin between the journalists in the press center. The Austrians thus prepared for hundreds of journalists from all over the world who would come to cover the opening of talks on the final agreement. But only a few dozen showed up. In the small cadre of devotees of this issue are reporters from the United States, Europe and Israel. Everybody knows everybody else.
The main arena where they meet to talk and write between negotiating rounds, and during them as well, is Twitter. Every statement, development or photograph earns a tweet. To know everything thats going on, all you have to do is update your feed every few minutes.
The thin turnout in the press center was not the only difference between the Iran talks in Geneva and the ones that opened Wednesday in Vienna, but it was certainly representative of that difference. The feeling both of the press and the negotiators was one of anticlimax.
While the Geneva talks were like a 100-meter sprint, in Vienna its more like a marathon. After the interim agreement bought time during which key elements in the Iranian nuclear program are being frozen, the pressure has gone down. Talks on the final agreement will be more cautious, more strategic. The negotiating teams know they might not even reach the finish line standing, and the price of every mistake could be high. The main impression from the first day of talks in Vienna is that the Iranians, as well as the representatives of the six powers the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany are ready for the long haul. In the interim agreement the parties agreed to six months of talks, but left themselves the option for a six-month extension.
Reporters on the scene in Vienna did not know much about the goings-on in the negotiating rooms on the first day. That was clear from the thin stream of tweets compared to the flow at Geneva. One reason for this was the laconic information given to reporters by representatives of the various delegations. The main role of diplomats on all sides was to keep expectations down.
Michael Mann, spokesman for EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, who represents the six powers at the talks, gave reporters a particularly paltry briefing. He said the modest goal for the three days of talks was to create a framework for negotiations to proceed in the coming months. The framework would determine the schedule of meetings and the level of officials who would attend each one.
According to Mann, there is no expectation on the part of Ashton, the Iranians or the representatives of the powers to reach an agreement on the first round, but they were determined to achieve progress. All of the international communitys concerns about the Iranian nuclear program would be discussed to ensure that it would be for peaceful purposes only, he said.
The Iranians were no more optimistic. When reporters asked Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi how the talks were going, he said they had gotten off to a good start.
Still, the Iranian side was more forthcoming. Araghchi said the Vienna talks would focus only on the nuclear program and that Iran would not agree to discuss additional issues, such as its missile program. He presented a tough opening position, saying that dismantling nuclear facilities or stopping it completely are not on the table as far as Iran was concerned.
Another reason for the relatively limited information reaching journalists on the first day of the talks was the venue. After the first meeting of the delegations at UN headquarters in Vienna, which ended in 45 minutes, the negotiating teams moved to the Coburg Palace in central Vienna. There, in a closed compound far from the eye of the media, is where the real talks took place as the Iranian delegation met with each of the other teams over several hours. The last meeting, which lasted for more than an hour, was between the Iranian and the American delegations. The first day ended with another meeting of all the delegations at Coburg.
No great drama will emerge from the first round of talks, given the wide gaps. But if the outcome is agreement on an agenda, working groups and a date for the next meeting, that will be no small achievement.
On Wednesday afternoon, as the talks were being launched in Vienna, the Twitter account of Irans supreme leader Ali Khamenei emitted a few interesting tweets. One includeda poster of Khamenei next to an excerpt in Englishfrom one of his speeches Nuclear arms have neither provided security nor boosted political power. The PR move by Khamenei and his advisers was interesting not only because of the use of Twitter, but because of the resemblance to a similar move a few months ago by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In October and November last year the Prime Ministers Bureau used his official Twitter account to post a picture of Khamenei with quotes in which he calls for the destruction of Israel under the heading the true face of Iran, and other statements dealing with human rights violations in Iran and Iranian assistance to terror or the killings in Syria.
Khameneis account tweeted a few more messages Wednesday to persuade people that Tehrans nuclear program was for peaceful purposes only. In one tweet, he said theuse of nuclear weapons was a sin in Islam.
Israel provided a bit of its own PR to attack the Iranian regimewith the opening of talks in Vienna. On a visit to an Israel Defense Forces field hospital in the Golan Heights that treats victims of the civil war in Syria, Netanyahu, who was accompanied only by members of the foreign press, not by Israeli reporters, said, On the day that the world powers are opening talks in Vienna with Iran, it is important for the world to see pictures from this place, referring to the hospital. This place separates the good in the world from the evil in the world. This is the true face of Israel. Irans true face, he said, was revealed in all the children wounded, to say nothing of those killed, who were harmed as a result of Iran arming, funding and instructing the Assad regime on the mass slaughter it is carrying out.
Netanyahu said the world should realize that Iran had not changed its aggressive policies. Iran had not changed its cruel character.
A senior Israeli official said on Wednesday that Israel is in continuous contact with representatives of some of the delegations to the talks with Iran. The Israeli message continues to be that everything possible must be done not to allow Iran to maintain its range of centrifuges.
If the agreement includes the array of centrifuges and uranium enrichment, this will lead to a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East, Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Wednesday in Jerusalem at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
By Haaretz
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