China Rejects Plea for North Korean Sanctions

SEOUL -- President Kim Young-sam sent his foreign minister to China on Wednesday and held urgent consultations with national security officials as pressure mounted to impose sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear program."International sanctions appear inevitable," Kim told a meeting of top security officials -- the first such gathering since he took office early last year. "The absolutely urgent task facing us is to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons development at whatever cost." But in Beijing, top Chinese officials met with visiting North Koreans and reiterated opposition to sanctions as a means of prying open North Korean nuclear facilities for inspection. The official Xinhua News Agency paraphrased top Communist Party official Hu Jintao as saying: "Under the current world situation, consolidating and strengthening bilateral cooperation and friendship not only accords with the fundamental interests of the two countries ... but is conducive to stability and peace in Asia and the world."China, as North Korea's only major ideological ally, is believed to have some influence with Pyongyang. Any sanctions also would be difficult to enforce without China's cooperation. Later Wednesday, South Korea's Kim telephoned President Boris Yeltsin to gain assurances of Moscow's support for possible UN sanctions on the Communist North, officials said. In the 20-minute telephone conversation, Yeltsin promised that Russia would cooperate in efforts to win UN Security Council approval for a sanctions resolution against the North, chief presidential spokesman Choo Don-shik said. Kim met Yeltsin in Moscow last week for wide-ranging discussions, including the North Korean nuclear issue. Both leaders voiced support for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. In Vienna, where the International Atomic Energy Agency has been meeting on the nuclear standoff, a North Korean envoy accused the United Nations of distorting facts. The envoy, Yun Ho Jin, also said Tuesday that the UN agency had passed up past opportunities to check reactor fuel -- a means of determining whether plutonium has been diverted for nuclear weapons -- and accused the United States and its allies of using nuclear inspections as a cover for military spying. President Kim said South Korea may have to reconsider an agreement it signed in 1992 with the North to ban nuclear arms on the Korean Peninsula. "If the North does not stop its nuclear drive, it will pose a serious challenge to our efforts to abide by the nuclear-free pact," Kim said in an interview with a local paper published Wednesday. "If the North wants dialogue, it will have to come out with a proposal to make such talks feasible" Kim said. "But this is not a time for the United States and South Korea to consider ways of bringing the North back to dialogue." Returning from intensive consultations with the United States and Japan in New York, South Korean nuclear ambassador Kim Sam-hoon told reporters Wednesday that "preparations for sanctions against North Korea are proceeding as intended." In one of its strongest warnings to date, the North said earlier this week that sanctions against it would provoke a war. The North invaded South Korea in 1950, setting off a three-year conflict. Suspicions that North Korea is developing nuclear weapons have intensified because of its refusal for more than 15 months to allow obligatory international nuclear inspections. The suspicions became acute last month when the North erased evidence of whether it has diverted plutonium for nuclear weapons.