The Hindu : China's hand behind meet on North Korea

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 18, 2003

International

International

China's hand behind meet on North Korea

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE April 17. China is understood to have played a pivotal role behind the scenes in arranging the tripartite talks on the North Korean nuclear issue. The parleys, involving the U.S. and China besides the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), may take place in Beijing as early as April 23, though the parties concerned have not yet confirmed a mutually acceptable date.

China's intervention appears to have been a qualitative response to the move by the United States to seek a negotiated settlement of the DPRK's nuclear arsenal issue through multilateral discussions involving Pyongyang's neighbours as well, according to regional diplomatic observers. In a sense, China, whose foreign policy has remained centred on the U.S. for some time now, responded to the U.S.' overtures.

For the U.S., the bottomline was its accord with China, reached during the Crawford Summit last year, that both would prefer to see the Korean peninsula become a nuclear-weapons-free zone (whatever might be the considerations of Beijing and Washington).

While China and the DPRK have not yet said much about the likely Beijing meeting, the U.S. has confirmed the likelihood of the trilateral parleys as a `preliminary' step towards multilateral talks. South Korea and Japan, besides Russia, have been taken into confidence by the U.S. in this connection.

South Korea, which broke the news on Wednesday, maintained today that it would be invited for "substantive talks'' at a later date if the `preliminary' meeting were to make progress. With this caveat, the South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun, said in Seoul today that a forward movement towards the resolution of the DPRK's nuclear issue was more important than his country's participation (euphemism for exclusion) in the meeting. Japan, too, viewed the issue in a more or less similar perspective.

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