The Hindu : China, U.S. explore DPRK issue afresh

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 17, 2003

International

International

China, U.S. explore DPRK issue afresh

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE July 16. China and the U.S. have intensified efforts to kick-start the `Beijing process' on North Korea's nuclear-weapons `programme'. The Chinese Foreign Minister, Li Zhaoxing, and the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, today held a telephonic conversation on the subject.

The "Beijing process'' involves discussions among the U.S. and North Korea, with China playing the proactive host-participant. Several key countries in the strategic neighbourhood of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea — South Korea and Japan, in particular, besides the U.S. — have pressed for larger multilateral talks, involving themselves too, in the place of the current format of trilateral discussions.

While no new formula was announced after the fresh round of Sino-American consultations, an "inside version'' that has gained currency within the Asia Pacific diplomatic circuit is that China is inclined to consider multilateral talks with a "compromise format'' as the defining feature. The idea is that such multilateral talks could have a specific sub-text — bilateral exchanges between North Korea and the U.S., albeit under the overarching framework of parleys among the countries directly concerned with the nuclear puzzle on the Korean peninsula.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry is understood to have briefed Western diplomats in Beijing on its latest thinking on the DPRK's nuclear profile and on the ways in which the question could be addressed.

The Chinese authorities have so far declined to confirm or contradict the diplomatic speculation that Beijing has now begun to actively press Pyongyang to accept the "compromise format'' of multilateral talks with a U.S.-DPRK bilateral stream within the overall framework of parleys.

The farthest that China is willing to specify at this sage is that the "Beijing talks'' must be kick-started again.

The only hint of China's possible preference for a conditional multilateral format is that manner in which Beijing has at this time underlined its willingness to be `open' to various ideas in which the DPRK issue could be considered.

The DPRK's reluctance to countenance the idea of multilateral talks is rooted in its belief that its nuclear status is not an international issue.

In Pyongyang's reckoning, the nuclear issue is traceable entirely to the manner in which the 1994 U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework had unravelled in recent years, especially so in recent months.

Reckoning that the DPRK would not wish to be encircled by the critics of its nuclear-weapons `programme' in multilateral parleys, South Korea, Pyongyang's ethnic kin, has begun yet another round of internal security consultations today.

On a separate but related front, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, now on a visit to Tokyo, has identified Japan as also South Korea and China, besides the U.S. and Russia, as the five countries that could bring about "steady diplomacy'' to resolve the DPRK nuclear issue.

Australia has interacted with the DPRK in the past on this issue.

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