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Washington: The
United States has served notice on India and 11 other major
importers of Iranian oil that a decision on imposing financial
sanctions on them would depend on progress in cutting down
supplies from Tehran.
"I think that depends on the progress of those countries," State
Department spokesman Victoria Nuland told reporters Wednesday when
asked when was the US expected to take a decision on India, China
and 10 other nations excluded from an exemptions list.
"You know where we are, that we'd like to see all of the countries
that trade heavily in Iranian crude reduce their numbers," she
said.
"So as we see the kind of progress that we saw with the EU and
with Japan, then we'll look at doing more of these," Nuland said.
"But conversations continue with those governments."
The United States Tuesday exempted Japan and ten European nations
- Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the
Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom - from US
sanctions for having significantly reduced purchases of Iranian
crude oil.
Asked if like Japan, 15 to 22 percent cut was the benchmark US
expected from the 12 remaining countries, Nuland said: "The
circumstances in Japan were particularly acute after the
earthquake, tsunami, and the loss of their nuclear power plants."
"Even in those extreme conditions where one could argue their
dependence might have gone up, they were able to cut by 15 to 20
percent," she noted adding, "So one would hope that countries can
do as much as they possibly can."
"We all have the same goal here, which is for these sanctions to
really pinch Iran and make it think twice about its nuclear
weapons programme, and convince it to come clean," Nuland said.
"So the more countries can do, the more we have the impact that we
desire."
Asked about US expectations from India, Nuland declined "to talk
about our specific negotiations with individual countries."
"But we are continuing to have productive discussions with India,
and they have some choices that they'll need to think about
making."
(Arun Kumar can
be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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