DISARMAMENT: UN Negotiations Need Jump-Start

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jun 3 1999 (IPS) - The president of the UN Conference on Disarmament, Mohamed-Salam Dembri, says that negotiations on reducing arms would continue despite current armed conflicts and internal disagreements on arms controls.

Dembri, an Algerian whose term expires in two weeks time, hopes to persuade fellow members of the Group of 21 (G-21) developing countries to back away from some of the differences with the western bloc that have kept the 1999 Conference on Disarmament at an impasse.

But the Algerian negotiator’s failures to date have cast a shadow on the conference as it reached its halfway point in 199 with his agenda yet to be approved.

The four-week rotation of the presidency will mean Argentina takes over this month followed by Australia. Both countries belong to the Western bloc, which would indicate little chance of winning over the G-21, observed a Latin American diplomat who requested anonymity.

As normally happens during the yearly session of the Conference on Disarmament, the participating non-aligned countries attempted to push negotiations for nuclear dismantling – an item to which the multilateral forum already had agreed.

The “big 5” nuclear powers – the United States, China, France, Britain and Russia – would prefer that further progress on the dismantling issue occur in bilateral arenas.

Dembri announced during Thursday’s session here that he would apply pressure for intensive meetings in order to obtain agreement on his agenda. He is attempting to reconcile the different proposals on the table as a means to loosen the talks from their current paralysis.

Dembri said he knows better than to expect that “the shared will of all” would overcome all problems to allow the Conference’s work to begin without further delay.

he also made it clear that any agreement would require “concessions from everyone involved.”

The Conference on Disarmament is considering an initiative from the United States, France and Britain – backed by other western countries – to establish a special committee to negotiate the treaty to ban fissile material production for use in nuclear arms.

But this solution is reduced to a mere presidential declaration that there are obstacles to ending the nuclear arms race and implementing nuclear disarmament.

The G-21 has maintained during recent years that this is the central disarmament issue and requires the creation of a special committee so that dismantling of nuclear arms is negotiated.

Stagnation of the Conference’s work also has resulted in delaying admission of its five newest members: Ecuador, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Tunisia.

India and Pakistan, two countries that became nuclear powers last year after both carried out nuclear arms tests, have been blocking the addition of new members to the Conference.

The Latin American source said that Pakistan objected to Ecuador’s inclusion because diplomats in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, had criticised the Pakistani and Indian nuclear tests.

The most recent session of the Conference resulted in verbal sparring between the United States and China over their differences regarding the Kosovo conflict.

The Sino-US debate arose over the question of human rights. Washington’s representative, Robert Grey, maintained that the two countries disagreed on issues of humanitarian and human rights, “lamentable, but true.”

The Jun 4 commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Chinese government’s repression of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square “reinforces these differences,” said Grey.

The representative from China, Li Changhe, responded that the Grey’s comments had “nothing to do with this conference.”

Li said judgements already had been made regarding China’s internal affairs, and Chinese authorities refused to accept any outside interference.