US mounts pressure on India, China to stop Iran oil

PTI

Washington, 29 Feb 2012: Asserting that it was going to ’’to keep an absolute foot on the pedal’’ the United States says it’s having ’’very intense and very blunt conversations’’ with India, China and Turkey to make them stop buying oil from Iran.

 

"Well, I think, with respect to China and Turkey and India, we’ve had very intense and very blunt conversations with each of those countries," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Senate panel Tuesday.

 

"I think that there are a number of steps that we are pointing out to them that we believe they can and should make," she said when asked about progress made with China, India and Turkey in this respect.

 

Clinton also suggested that these countries were taking some unspecified actions without publicly talking about the, "I also can tell you that in a number of cases, both on their government side and on their business side, they are taking actions that go further and deeper than perhaps their public statements might lead you to believe," she said.

 

"And we’re going to continue to keep an absolute foot on the pedal in terms of our accelerated, aggressive outreach to them," Clinton said noting "they are looking for ways to make up the lost revenues, the lost crude oil."

 

That’s a difficulty for a lot of countries besides India, China and Turkey, she said. "So we’ve had to put together an entire team to try to assist them in thinking through ways of doing that."

 

Later, Clinton told another senate panel that the US was "implementing the new Iran sanctions aggressively."

 

"We have been travelling the world, high-level teams from Treasury, Energy and State, to explain what the sanctions are to counterparts around the world."

 

"We’re very frank in these discussions about the requirements of US law," Clinton said. "And we have seen a lot of action. A broad range of countries are making decisions to reduce their dependence on Iranian crude, unwind their dealings with the central bank of Iran."

 

US, she said, was "also pushing very hard to make it clear that we’ll help countries that have a significant dependence on Iranian crude to try to find alternatives.