N Korea and Syria deny nuclear claims
North Korea and Syria today denied claims that they are co-operating on a Syrian nuclear programme.
Both countries accused US officials of spreading the accusations for political reasons – either to back Israel or to block progress on a deal between Washington and Pyongyang.
The two countries spoke out amid widespread speculation over a September 6 Israeli air incursion over Syria in which US officials have said Israeli warplanes struck a target.
Details of the incursion remain unclear, with Israel remaining silent. Syria has said no air strike took place and that warplanes violated its airspace and dropped munitions to lighten their load as they fled Syrian air defences.
Last week, a senior US non-proliferation official said Syria was believed to be approaching “secret suppliers” for nuclear technology and that North Korean personnel were in the country, raising theories that the Israelis were targeting a nuclear installation.
A Syrian Cabinet minister on Tuesday ridiculed the speculation.
“All this rubbish is not true. I don’t know how their imagination has reached such creativity,” Bouthaina Shaaban said of the reports of Syrian-North Korean nuclear cooperation.
She said the reports – including ones of a recent North Korean shipment to Syria – were “all fabricated stories which have no value and truth.”
“Regretfully, the international press is busy justifying an aggression on a sovereign state and the world should be busy condemning it instead of inventing reasons and aims of this aggression,” Shaaban told Lebanon’s Hezbollah television station Al-Manar.
Syria’s nuclear programme has long been considered to be minimal, and the country is known to have only a small research reactor. In Vienna, officials for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declined comment. But a diplomat associated with the agency said the IAEA “didn’t know anything about any nuclear facility in Syria, and if there is something there we should know”.
Syria was the subject of IAEA investigation in 2004 on suspicions it could have been a customer of the nuclear black market run by Pakistani engineer A Q Khan - the same operation that supplied Iran and Libya with materials for their clandestine atomic projects.
But the diplomat, who demanded anonymity for discussing confidential information, said the agency found no concrete evidence of such activity.
A US military official said last week that the Israel raid targeted weapons being shipped to the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon. Others have speculated that Israel was reconnoitring flight paths for an eventual strike against Iran.
North Korea today also strongly denied it secretly helped Syria develop a nuclear programme, claiming the charge was fabricated by US hard-liners to block progress in the North’s relations with the US.
The North’s foreign ministry said the suspicions are “nothing but a clumsy plot” fabricated again by “dishonest forces” who do not want to see “progress in the six-party talks and in the (North Korea)-US relations.”
By “dishonest forces” the North apparently referred to US officials who have called for a stronger approach to deal with the communist nation.
The six-party talks – including China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the US - are international negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear programmes.
There has been progress in the nuclear negotiations in recent months, with North Korea shutting down its sole functioning nuclear reactor in July and preparing to disable its nuclear facilities under a February agreement. However, a session expected to convene this week has been delayed for unknown reasons.
The ministry said North Korea has upheld a pledge it made last October, when it conducted its first-ever nuclear test, that North Korea would be “a responsible nuclear weapons state” and not transfer any nuclear material out of the country.
A Syrian state-run newspaper Tishrin said in an editorial today that the US was fomenting the accusations to excuse Israel’s incursion. It compared them to American claims in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq that then-leader Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
The accusations against Syria “recall those false claims that the Americans and the British circulated about Iraq’s nuclear programmes,” the paper, which reflects Syrian government thinking, said in a front-page editorial.
It said Washington’s “blatant bias toward Israel has hurt – and continues to hurt – the image the United States and its role of justice, fairness and the preservation of international peace”.
Meanwhile, the US said today that it would be prepared to resume the six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme next week after an unexpected delay.
The latest round in the four-year-old talks had tentatively been expected to begin midweek in Beijing, China, but South Korean and Japanese officials said yesterday they would be postponed. It was not immediately clear why the talks have been delayed.
“The Chinese have talked to us about the possibility of an envoys level meeting next week and we are ready to go next week if everybody else is ready to go,” state department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
McCormack would not comment on reports that the United States has intelligence that North Korea was helping Syria develop a nuclear programme.
But asked about speculation that China had delayed the meeting because it was concerned that the US was preparing to confront North Korea about the intelligence, McCormack said that US negotiators believe that non-proliferation was an appropriate topic for the talks.
“Can you raise non-proliferation at these talks?” he said. “Absolutely, that is the case. We have done so and will continue to do so in the context of the six-party talks.”
