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China for non-nuclearisation of Korean peninsula

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE FEB. 13. China today underlined its `insistence' on the "non-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula" in the context of the decision by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report to the United Nations Security Council that Pyongyang was fully in "non-compliance" with the `binding' Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a related SafeguardsAgreement.

The stand was enunciated by the Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, during talks in Beijing today with Lee Hae-chan, visiting Special Envoy of the South Korean President-elect, Roh Moo-hyun. The Chinese stand over N. Korea's suspected nuclear weapons programme is important on account of Beijing's substantive strategic equation with Pyongyang. As a veto-empowered permanent member of the Security Council, China is in a position to determine the U.N.'s view of North Korea's NPT infractions.

At the relevant meeting of the IAEA's Board of Governors in Vienna on Wednesday, China voted in favour of the resolution that tossed the North Korean issue onto the Security Council's lap. The overall technical reasoning by the IAEA was that North Korea's recent exit from the NPT would not free that country from its non-proliferation commitments as regards facilities that had been originally placed under international surveillance in terms of the Treaty.

Of the disparate triumvirate of East Asian countries most directly concerned with this issue, Japan today insisted on having a say during the Security Council's likely debates on North Korea. Tokyo argued that its strategic interests on the Korean peninsula should be as much a compelling factor in the Security Council's reckoning as in the IAEA's. The Foreign Ministry in Tokyo called upon Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme in "a verifiable manner." Japan was also seized of North Korea's potential ballistic missiles programme.

South Korea, ethnic kin of the North, welcomed the IAEA's move but did not call off the on-going inter-Korean dialogue on economic cooperation. Mr. Roh said that Seoul "should be different from the United States" where necessary and discuss `differences' with Washington to prevent the present crisis from escalating into a war. North Korea itself, "a nation in its own style," a studied depiction by Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig, today remained convinced of its strategic capabilities to meet the new challenges from the U.S. and the U.N. (as perceived from Pyongyang).

The North officially refuted, too, the American allegations that it was but a "terrorist regime"

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