Cautious Fabius notes more openness in Rohani statements

France has taken note of recent statements by Iranian President Hassan Rohani and has registered "a lot more openness" in the language used by the new Iranian leader, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Monday. But speaking on "BFM" television, Fabius said that Paris wants to see if this language will lead to "acts" and concrete results on Iranian involvement in Syria and on the controversial nuclear issue. Fabius was speaking from New York where he is attending the UN General Assembly and where President Francois Hollande is scheduled to meet with Rohani on Tuesday for the first time. The meeting between the French and Iranian leaders is taking place after a request for "dialogue" by Iran, Fabius said, noting that France would want to discuss the Iranian role in Syria, where he said Tehran was "one of the belligerents" in that conflict. Fabius also reiterated that the nuclear issue would be addressed in the contacts with Rohani. In parallel, this week, Iranian officials are due to meet relevant Security Council members at the level of Minister to discuss the nuclear question. "There is a big affair, which is the affair of Iranian nuclear (programmes). In as much as Iran can rightly use civil nuclear energy, we are nonetheless not in agreement that Iran gets the atomic bomb," Fabius said in the interview. He said this was the position of all the major powers involved in negotiations with Iran on its nuclear sector amid concerns by several nations that Iran might be misusing atomic research to get a military capability in the nuclear domain. Rohani has said publicly since his election that Iran was not and will not build a nuclear bomb, but all sites in Iran have not been opened to international inspections to reassure the international community. "So we are going to see if we can get peaceful progress in Syria, and on the nuclear plane, repeat to the Iranians that it is out of the question that they can acquire the atomic bomb. Nuclear proliferation would be too dangerous in this region of the world," Fabius said.