UN to give North Korea 'one more chance'

“North Korea will be given another chance to come into compliance,” said a senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Ahead of an emergency meeting to be held later today in Vienna, the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors already had a draft resolution urging the communist country to comply with its obligations under international nuclear accords, the official said.

Parts of the declaration were to be sorted out in today’s meeting, but the essence of the document was that “reporting to the Security Council would be something that would happen if they do not comply,” he added.

Referring the dispute to the council – a last resort for the IAEA, the UNs’ nuclear watchdog – could lead to punitive sanctions or other actions against North Korea’s regime for expelling IAEA inspectors last month and reactivating an idle nuclear complex.

A senior agency official had earlier said the IAEA was running out of options and soon would have little choice but to turn the matter over to the Security Council.

Today’s closed-door meeting of the IAEA board came amid new diplomatic efforts to ease the stand-off.

South Korea said it would present a compromise plan to the United States within days and send a top envoy to Washington later in the week.

South Korea also pressed Russia – one of North Korea’s few allies – to help persuade the North to back down, and Moscow yesterday agreed to step up its contacts with Pyongyang.

North Korea lashed out at the United States yesterday, accusing it of trying to “disarm” the North by pressuring it to scrap its nuclear programmes.

The isolated country, stung by an energy crisis, insists it needs the power. Washington says the five-megawatt reactor in question would produce a mere trickle of electricity and could be used to produce nuclear weapons.

North Korea alarmed the world in October by admitting to a US envoy that it had a secret uranium-based nuclear weapons programme, in violation of a 1994 accord.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Friday that Washington has no intention of negotiating with Pyongyang until it freezes its atomic programmes in respect of the 1994 agreement.

Caught in the middle is the Vienna-based IAEA, which maintained two inspectors in North Korea until New Year’s Eve, when they left after the North said they were no longer welcome.

The agency has monitored a nuclear “safeguards agreement” with North Korea since 1992, when inspections and analysis suggested the North was concealing undeclared plutonium.

“The agency has never had the complete picture regarding (North Korean) nuclear activities and has never been able to provide assurances regarding the peaceful character of its nuclear programme,” an IAEA fact sheet on North Korea says.

Last week’s expulsions came after the North removed IAEA seals and surveillance cameras from its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, the capital.

Although he denounced North Korea for its “nuclear brinkmanship,” IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said the country should be given one more chance to pull back before the crisis mushrooms into a full-blown stand-off with the West.

ElBaradei, whose agency also leads the hunt for nuclear weaponry in Iraq, said last week its board had held out hope that North Korea would relent and readmit the inspectors. Instead, the country snubbed the agency by failing to respond to a letter of protest sent by ElBaradei.

The IAEA board includes representatives from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Panama, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States.