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Diplomatic Differences Mar Glitter of Summit

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TIMES STAFF WRITERS

As President Bush and a dozen other world leaders converged on New York on Thursday for a lustrous summit of the U.N. Security Council, the event lost a bit of its glitter when their ambassadors failed to agree on a vital nuclear non-proliferation clause for the final declaration that will come from the meeting.

British Ambassador David Hannay, who has presided over the Security Council this month, tried to put the best face on the embarrassment by announcing that the declaration enjoyed “very broad support.” But, by this time, he and his colleagues were supposed to have reached what the United Nations likes to call “a consensus.

Later, however, a British government source expressed optimism that there would finally be a consensus on the declaration. “We’ll continue working on it until the last minutes,” he said.

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The disagreement was clearly significant, for it reflected two troubling problems of the United Nations: a Third World suspicion of the motives of the Western industrialized nations and an outdated Security Council configuration that ignores the new power of Germany and Japan.

It also underscored the difficulty the institution will face in making progress on one of the chief issues confronting it.

In another conflict, U.N. sources said that China has objected to a clause condemning human rights violations

The disagreements, though, did not touch the central matter of the final declaration--a call for Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to submit a plan by July 1 to modernize the organization so that it can try to prevent wars from breaking out.

Since the summit was a British idea, largely designed to enhance the image of Prime Minister John Major during an election year, the embarrassment at the Security Council did not appear to trouble Bush as he rushed through a round of private meetings with some of the individual leaders at his suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

The meetings brought Bush in touch with both the powerful and the minimal. Not only did he meet Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa of Japan but Prime Minister Carlos Carvalho Veiga of the Cape Verde Islands as well, the leader of a small archipelago off the west coast of Africa. Both countries were elected this year to two-year terms on the Security Council. “You are nice to come all this way for a one-day meeting,” the President told Carvalho Veiga.

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Bush also met with King Hassan II of Morocco and Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitsky, then dined with Britain’s Major. He will hold his controversial session today with Chinese Premier Li Peng.

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