U.S. and Allies Debate Costs of N. Korea Deal : Asia: Clinton meets hurriedly with leaders of Japan, S. Korea. They must share burden for nuclear accord.

President Clinton held a hastily arranged meeting Monday night with the top leaders of Japan and South Korea to try to settle some of the squabbling over how much each country will have to pay under the nuclear accord the United States recently signed with North Korea.

After a dinner that marked the formal opening of the 18-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Clinton rushed off to a quick round of talks with Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama and South Korean President Kim Young Sam.

Today, Clinton and the other APEC leaders, all of them clad in specially designed Indonesian batik, gathered at the summer palace in Bogor for a daylong discussion of Asian trade and economic issues.

At a news conference Monday, Clinton acknowledged that there are problems still to be worked out in the nuclear deal he approved last month. Leaders in Washington, Tokyo and Seoul realized, he said, that “implementation of the agreement would not be without difficulty.”

That amounted to a polite way of saying that the three governments are bickering, mostly about money and contracts, one Administration source acknowledged. “They haven’t worked out the exact shares yet,” a senior U.S. official said.

There was some urgency to the top-level session, because Washington, Tokyo and Seoul are supposed to work out by the end of next month what each country will do for North Korea.

“We pretty much have a deadline of the end of the year,” one White House official explained Monday. “. . . At this point, we’re trying to get the contracts negotiated and arrange the financing and the energy supplies.”

The Clinton Administration promised last month that it would organize a consortium of countries, including South Korea and Japan, to provide North Korea with new, safer nuclear reactors and with additional supplies of fuel oil. These are meant to compensate North Korea for freezing and eventually dismantling its current nuclear facilities, which can be used to make bombs.

However, the agreement did not spell out each nation’s share of the costs, which will total an estimated $4 billion merely for the two new light-water nuclear reactors. Clinton Administration sources say Japan, in particular, has been balking at paying too much of the bill.

“They suspect that they’re going to be asked to foot a major portion of this, and we haven’t done anything to disabuse them of that notion,” one Administration official said Monday.

Lower-level officials of the three governments are supposed to meet in Washington this week to iron out the details of what will be called the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO), the consortium to supply the reactors and energy to North Korea.

But Japanese and South Korean officials apparently asked for the top-level meeting here among Clinton, Kim and Murayama in order to give top-level support to the effort. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher said he felt it would be important for the three leaders to “talk about the sharing of expenses (and) energize the bureaucracies (in their home countries).”

The nuclear accord specifies that South Korea will play a leading role in supplying the new light-water nuclear reactors to North Korea. South Korea is eager to do that, both because it will mean contracts for South Korean companies and also because it wants to ensure that a future, reunified Korea will be operating on the same nuclear technology South Korea now employs.

Both South Korea and the United States want Japan to pay a major share of the expenses. According to some Japanese press reports, Tokyo was originally asked to pay 40% of the total costs of the new nuclear reactors, which would be about $1.6 billion.

But officials in Tokyo reportedly don’t want to foot the bill without playing some significant role in the contracts and technology involved in the North Korea project.

“The bulk of the financing, the overwhelming majority of it, will come from Japan and from (South) Korea,” a senior Administration official told reporters Monday night. He said the United States might also pay some of the costs, but only on what he called “a much lower level.”

North Korea was the dominant issue at Clinton’s meetings throughout the day Monday with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Murayama and Kim.

“All the leaders indicated their strong support for the agreement we reached with North Korea to freeze and then to dismantle its ability to build nuclear weapons,” Clinton told reporters at a brief news conference late Monday.

The President won important new backing from China to encourage North and South Korea to open talks with one another.

Chinese officials said Jiang, in a separate meeting with the South Korean president, had also pressed for an opening of talks between the two Koreas. The Chinese president told Kim he hoped “that North and South Korea will set their eyes on the future . . . so as to gradually improve the relations between the two countries.”

At his news conference, Clinton defended his handling of human rights issues with China. During an hourlong meeting with the Chinese president earlier in the day, Clinton concentrated on Korea and trade issues, mentioning the subject of human rights but not giving it top priority.

“The United States, perhaps more than any other country in the world, consistently and regularly raises human rights issues,” the President asserted at his news conference. “ . . . We made it absolutely clear that in order for the United States’ relationship with China to fully flower, there had to be progress on all fronts.”

China recently released eight dissidents. But it continues to hold many other political prisoners--among them Wei Jingsheng, China’s best-known advocate of democratic reforms. Aides said Clinton did not raise the cases of any individual dissidents during his meeting with the Chinese president.

“His (Clinton’s) silence on human rights seals the fate of people like Gao Yu, the journalist who just got six years in jail for leaking state secrets in China,” said Mike Jendreczjyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch/Asia, a leading American human rights group.