Ahmadinejad: Sanctions unable to stop Iran’s progress

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he is confident that the Iranian nation will continue the path of progress and will go past the hurdle of the sanctions which have been imposed on the country by the West.“Iran is always victorious, great and progressing,” Ahmadinejad told reporters after a cabinet meeting in Tehran on Wednesday.Asked if the western sanctions against Iran will likely be annulled after the upcoming talks between Tehran and the world powers, he said, “Iran is a country which enjoys several thousand years of history and will go past all obstacles.”The last round of the fresh talks between Tehran and the Group 5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) ended in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on February 27, reported the Fars News Agency.During the talks Iran and the world powers agreed to hold an experts meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 17-18 and then continue their talks at the level of their top negotiators in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on April 5-6.Before Almaty talks, Iran and the G5+1 had held three rounds of negotiations in Geneva, two rounds in Istanbul, one round in Baghdad and one round in Moscow. The last round of talks between Iran and the Group 5+1 was held in Moscow in June.Washington and its Western allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, while they have never presented any corroborative evidence to substantiate their allegations. Iran denies the charges and insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry.Despite the rules enshrined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entitling every member state, including Iran, to the right of uranium enrichment, Tehran is now under four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions and the western embargos for turning down West’s calls to give up its right of uranium enrichment.Tehran has dismissed West’s demands as politically tainted and illogical, stressing that sanctions and pressures merely consolidate Iranians’ national resolve to continue the path.Tehran has repeatedly said that it considers its nuclear case closed as it has come clean of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s questions and suspicions about its past nuclear activities.