U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday that Iran is a very important regional power that can play a major role in helping end the Syrian conflict and should be allowed to participate in next month's peace conference in Switzerland. Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, accused the United States on Friday of blocking Iran's participation. Ban said Monday that he plans to issue invitations before the end of December to the Jan. 22 peace conference and expressed hope that "the question of Iran's participation is resolved soon." The U.N. chief said "negotiations will be difficult, but without them there is only bloodshed and despair on the horizon." Meanwhile, Iran is seeking to improve bilateral relations with the U.S. and other Western powers, President Hassan Rouhani said in an editorial published Monday in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "We want to rebuild and improve our relations to European and North American countries on a basis of mutual respect," Rouhani wrote. "We are striving to avoid new burdens on relations between Iran and the United States and also to remove the tensions that we have inherited," he said. Rouhani has promised to reduce Tehran's international isolation and to ensure an easing of sanctions. Tehran and Washington severed relations after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. "Iran cannot forget everything that has affected relations with the United States over the last 60 years, he wrote, but added: "We must now concentrate on the present and orientate ourselves towards the future." Rouhani, a former nuclear negotiator, said he was doing whatever he could to end tensions over Tehran's nuclear activities, which have raised concerns in the West that Iran is seeking to develop an atomic weapons capability. Iranian officials have repeatedly denied such suggestions. "We have never even considered the option of acquiring nuclear weapons," Rouhani said. "We'll never give up our right to profit from nuclear energy. But we are working towards removing all doubts and answer all reasonable questions about our program." Iran agreed under the Nov. 24 accord to stop its most sensitive nuclear work -- uranium enrichment to a fissile concentration of 20 percent -- and cap other parts of its activities in exchange for some limited easing of sanctions, including trade in petrochemicals and gold. On Sunday, world powers and Iran suspended their technical talks in Geneva on how to implement the agreement until after the Christmas holidays.
