Asia-Pacific turmoil shadows free-trade talks
Asia-Pacific turmoil shadows free-trade talks
AUCKLAND (AFP): Asia-Pacific trading powers braced Monday for high-security free trade talks overshadowed by delicate China-US relations, crisis in East Timor and tension on the Korean Peninsula.
Trade officials from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum were flying into the New Zealand business capital on the eve of a week's meetings to be protected by about 6,000 police and troops,
The officials were to spend two days hammering out a declaration for their political masters to help propel APEC members further along the road to becoming a tariff-free region by 2020.
Ministerial meetings take place Sept 9-10, followed by a summit of the APEC leaders September 12-13, including US President Bill Clinton, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian Premier Vladimir Putin.
But the negotiations have already been shoved out of the limelight by China's efforts to get US approval for its entry into the World Trade Organization and by turmoil elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.
Jiang and Clinton are to hold a landmark meeting on the sidelines of the APEC leaders' summit here -- their first encounter since NATO warplanes bombed Beijing's embassy in Belgrade on May 7 killing three Chinese nationals.
"We are interested in moving forward in our relations with China," a US official told AFP. "The Chinese were quite upset in the wake of the bombing of their embassy and they asked that certain discussions be held off."
But China's efforts to enter the World Trade Organization would now be discussed at the technical level in Auckland ahead of the Clinton-Jiang summit, said the official.
U.S. approval of China's WTO membership bid is critical to allowing the world's most-populous nation to join a landmark "millennium round" of trade talks to be kicked off in Seattle in November.
"If China and the U.S. are able to make progress on the WTO then that is an advance of trade," the U.S. official said.
He noted that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Stanley Roth told journalists in Australia earlier that Washington hoped the summit would mark "significant progress on WTO," ideally ending with an agreement.
Chinese officials were also expected to raise at the summit their anger at Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui's July 9 call for a "special state-to-state relationship" with Beijing. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province.
Officials have said the violence tearing through East Timor would be discussed in Auckland, probably at the level of foreign ministers.
Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy has said his officials contacted the United States, Australia and New Zealand as a first step towards organizing a special meeting on East Timor.
A Canadian official here said details had yet to be worked out.
In Indonesia, anti-independence militiamen attacked camps and clinics housing thousands of refugees in East Timor as the United Nations began evacuating staff after last week's overwhelming vote rejecting Indonesian rule.
Officials say North Korea is also on the agenda for an unprecedented trilateral summit between Japan, South Korea and the United States.
The meeting would follow U.S.-North Korean talks which are to resume in Berlin September 7-11 with a meeting between US special envoy Charles Kartman and North Korean vice foreign minister Kim Gye-Gwan.
North Korea test-fired a medium-range Taepodong I ballistic missile over Japanese territory on August 31 last year. Growing fears of a new launch, this time of a longer-range Taepodong II, have eased after Pyongyang conceded the possibility of talks over the missile concerns.
APEC, whose members account for about half of world trade, is to review progress in its goal of tearing down tariff and investment barriers by 2010 for advanced members and by 2020 for the rest.
It also expects to issue non-binding principles to make Asia- Pacific markets more transparent, insulating them against a fresh outbreak of the financial crisis that erupted in the region in July 1997.