‘Ice Is Being Broken’ as Leaders Prepare for Summit

The official agenda at the three-day U.N. Millennium Summit is lofty and utopian: to bring peace and prosperity to the world. But even before the start of the summit today, world leaders were caught up in their own pressing concerns, from the U.S. edging closer to ties with Iran to the North Koreans getting hot under the collar after an alleged strip search.

A U.S. president hasn’t spoken directly to his Iranian counterpart since the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attended a discussion Tuesday chaired by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, a symbolic overture after more than 20 years of strained relations.

“Let’s say the ice is being broken and things are moving in the right direction,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.

President Clinton has no official plans to meet Khatami this week, but there are hopes that the two leaders will meet casually in a hotel lobby or hallway during the summit.

Perhaps the most anticipated meetings of the week involve Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, in a last-ditch attempt at Mideast peace.

Clinton had planned to shuttle between the two in separate rooms at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel today, but expectations for face-to-face talks between the Mideast leaders soared Tuesday when Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said Arafat had told him that he would meet Barak. The Israeli side, however, downplayed the suggestion.

“From our point of view, there is no such meeting,” an Israeli spokesman accompanying Barak in New York said Tuesday evening.

Even if peace isn’t made in the corridors of the Waldorf, there may be another chance. The U.S. goal is to persuade Arafat to postpone declaring a Palestinian state and have the leaders attend a “Camp David II” for three to five days, a senior American official said. There would be pressure to conclude talks by Sept. 28, the eve of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah.

One meeting that won’t take place is between North and South Korean leaders about the peninsula’s possible reunification. The North Korean delegation canceled its trip to the summit Tuesday after an unpleasant encounter with security at a German airport. After the incident, North Korea denounced the U.S. as “a rogue state,” claiming that the American government had ordered the strip search of the country’s delegation as its members transferred to an American Airlines flight.

“U.S. security officials turned up, opened suitcases and handbags of each member of the presidential entourage, forced them to take off their clothes and shoes, and thoroughly searched each and every sensitive part of the body,” Choe Su Hon, North Korea’s deputy foreign minister, said in Frankfurt.

An airline spokesman apologized and said the “pat-down” search involved removing only jackets and shoes. The United States said it regretted the incident and attributed it to a mutual misunderstanding.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said that the security officials apparently didn’t recognize the group as a government delegation and that the North Koreans were unfamiliar with the security procedure.

Cuban President Fidel Castro, one leader watched closely by Washington, arrived in New York on Tuesday under tight security--he is one of 18 heads of state and government deemed “high risk”--and went straight to the Cuban mission. He later met with Chinese leaders at their mission. Several anti-Castro rallies are planned for today, when he will address the summit.

The rallies represent a handful of the 91 demonstrations scheduled for this week. The protesters range from members of the Falun Gong spiritual group, who will meditate in front of the Chinese mission to protest the arrest of many of their counterparts in China, to members of the Iranian resistance, four of whom were arrested over the weekend for throwing balloons filled with paint at Khatami.

Khatami continued his jabs at the West on Tuesday. “Member states of the United Nations should endeavor to remove barriers from the way of dialogue among cultures and civilizations, and should abide by the basic precondition of dialogue,” he said in an apparent reference to economic sanctions, which his government cites as a key obstacle to the renewal of U.S.-Iranian relations.

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Times staff writers John J. Goldman, Norman Kempster, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson and Robin Wright contributed to this report.