UN nuclear agency takes first crack at N Korea

NORTH KOREA and the United Nations nuclear agency exchanged their first blows yesterday as the international crisis over Pyongyang's suspected nuclear weapons programme intensified.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to suspend technical aid to North Korea as a penalty for its refusal to grant access to IAEA inspectors seeking evidence of a secret nuclear bomb.

North Korea immediately countered by saying it would no longer guarantee continuity of nuclear safeguards, and would ask the only two UN inspectors in the country to leave. 'It's clear we have reached something of a watershed in our relations with North Korea,' the IAEA director-general, Hans Blix, said. Diplomats said the vote's significance lay in the fact that China, an IAEA executive member, did not vote in Pyongyang's favour.

The United States pressed ahead yesterday with efforts to impose an international embargo on North Korea, although China repeated that it did not support sanctions to resolve the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear programme.

Jiang Zemin, China's President and Communist Party general secretary, once more spelt out the country's opposition to sanctions in a Japanese television interview, but the US and other Western members of the United Nations Security Council still believe Peking may finally be persuaded to go along with international sanctions against North Korea. Diplomats said a draft sanctions resolution could emerge in New York next week, but the need to show the Chinese that Pyongyang has been given every chance to come into line means that bargaining could go on at the UN for several weeks.

The US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, conceded China did not consider sanctions 'the preferred way to deal with the situation'. But, he added, 'I would distinguish between what they would prefer and also what they might abstain from if the other members of the Security Council were going along that route.'

North Korea raised the stakes in its confrontation with the international community when it began removing fuel rods from a reactor last month, ignoring UN calls to stop. This week the operation was completed, effectively making it impossible to discover with certainty whether plutonium was extracted in the past for possible use in nuclear weapons.

The first set of sanctions could be fairly mild - non-scheduled air links could be halted and imports and exports of arms banned. Tougher sanctions would include cutting off oil imports, most of which come through China, freezing Pyongyang's few foreign assets and stopping transfers of funds from the estimated 250,000 North Koreans living in Japan. These amount to between dollars 400m and dollars 1bn (pounds 266m-pounds 670m) a year, a vital source of funds for an impoverished country whose total annual imports are only dollars 1.5bn.

Amid the flurry of international comings and goings over the crisis, South Korea was somewhat disconcerted yesterday by news that the former US President turned private mediator, Jimmy Carter, would visit both Pyongyang and Seoul next week. The government had called his mission 'inappropriate' when it was suggested by an opposition leader. A spokesman said President Kim Young Sam had been assured by President Bill Clinton that he had not known of Mr Carter's trip, and that the former president would not carry any message from Washington.

(Photograph omitted)