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.