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Iranian president ridicules European nuclear offer Iran's
hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday ridiculed a European
Union plan to offer incentives in exchange for his country agreeing
to halt sensitive nuclear work. In a confident speech carried live on state-run television, the president vowed the Islamic regime would not bow to demands it freeze uranium enrichment work -- at the centre of fears the country could acquire atomic weapons. "We accepted a suspension for two years," Ahmadinejad said, referring to a now-moribund deal with leading EU members Britain, France and Germany. "This was a bitter experience for the Iranian people. The Iranians won't be bitten twice on the same spot," he told a crowd of thousands, drawing chants of "Death to America" and "Ahmadinejad, we love you." Enrichment is a process that makes fuel for nuclear power reactors but can also produce the core of a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that it only wants to make reactor fuel and that this is a right enshrined by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). "We don't need incentives. There is no need to give us incentives, just don't try to wrong us," said the president during the rock festival-style rally. The European powers are currenty drawing up a package of trade and technological incentives they hope will coax Iran into voluntarily curbing its atomic ambitions. Under the draft deal Russia would enrich uranium on Iran's behalf. The offer -- which could include helping Iran acquire a light-water nuclear reactor -- was to have been reviewed Friday in London by the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany, but this meeting will likely be postponed until next week. A similar offer was made last year but also spurned by Tehran. But Security Council members remain divided over how to crack down on Iran if the new offer is rejected. Washington, along with the so-called EU-3, wants a Security Council resolution that would make a suspension legally-binding -- but Russia and China fear this would worsen tensions and open the door to military action. In his speech Ahmadinejad confidently asserted that the Western powers were doomed to fail. "These bullying powers are nothing and are bound to go away because they stand in the way of truth. They will be defeated and they won't last. This is the divine tradition," he said in his speech in Arak, situated 250 kilometres (160 miles) southwest of Tehran. Arak is also the site of a planned heavy-water reactor, another source of concern in the West. "As long as the nation is pious, it will overcome all problems and will humiliate the enemies," Ahmadinejad said. The firebrand president also repeated a warning that Iran could follow the path of North Korea and quit the NPT and end International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections if faced with even more international pressure. "Don't act in a way so that countries and other people stop being a member of the NPT and finish with the agency," he warned. ---------------------------------------------------
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