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NAM sets up panels on Iraq, N. Korea

By P. S. Suryanarayana

KUALA LUMPUR FEB. 20. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) today set up sub-committees on Iraq, disarmament issues and the North Korean "proliferation" puzzle in a bid to arrive at a consensus on these sensitive matters of immediate relevance to the forum's efforts to evolve an updated political agenda.

An intensive discussion on Palestine was also decided upon. A separate statement on the current Iraq crisis is considered likely at this stage. These panels will work under the overall auspices of the Political Committee that the NAM senior officials constituted for preparing the ground for the forum's thirteenth summit early next week. The 114-member NAM will be enlarged to 116 at this summit. Malaysia's Foreign Minister, Syed Hamid Albar, presided over today's inaugural session of the preparatory meetings, after South Africa, the previous NAM Chairman, handed over the `baton'.

While some highly contentious political issues were discussed, the deliberations of the NAM's Economic and Social Committee made relatively rapid progress on questions ranging from globalisation to the more traditional aspects of South-South cooperation. The issue of terrorism, in the specific context of the U.S. view of Iraq's suspected plans to make and deploy weapons of mass destruction and in the separate domain of North Korea's "proliferation" agenda, is posing a particularly difficult challenge to the NAM at this juncture, according to diplomats from various countries.

On proliferation, India has, as the leading founder member of the NAM, taken the line that countries with legally binding commitments under international law should abide by them, regardless of the issue that New Delhi will not sign the discriminatory Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On Iraq, Pakistan has, as a non-permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, adopted a nuanced position. Pakistan's Permanent Representative at the U.N.'s Geneva Office, Shaukat Umer, said: "it is not correct to put things in black and white" as regards the evolving dynamics of the confrontation between U.S. and Iraq. On whether Pakistan was not placing itself on a collision course with the U.S. by insisting on "multilateralism" on the Iraq issue, he said: Islamabad favoured "compliance" by Iraq insofar as the relevant U.N. resolutions were concerned.

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