Security on Agenda at Asia-Pacific Talks

SANTIAGO, Chile — While economic development is the mission of the annual Pacific regional conference being held here this week, issues of national security are again intruding into the conversation — especially when American officials are in the room.

Trade liberalization was supposed to be the headliner for the well-heeled emissaries of the 21 nations in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group meeting. But President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell are signaling that both here and throughout Bush’s second term, the top of the diplomatic agenda will include the threat from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, weapons proliferation, border security and the threat from Islamic militants.

Powell said en route to the meeting that although Bush’s top priority will be easing trade barriers, “there is an agreement that we have to work together on ...counterterrorism activities.... We have to work together on dealing with the potential for weapons of mass destruction, and there will be other nonproliferation issues that will be discussed among member states.”

The group has “increasingly turned its attention to security issues,” said another senior administration official.

Tens of thousands of anti-globalization and anti-Bush demonstrators marched through downtown Santiago today, with police making dozens of arrests.

“Our march has two objectives: rejecting Bush’s visit and calling into question the market model APEC stands for,” said Victor de la Fuente, a spokesman for the Chilean Social Forum, which organized an authorized march.

Police said 20,000 people attended the march today, while organizers estimated the crowd at 70,000.

Bush will hold a flurry of bilateral meetings over the weekend, starting Saturday morning with foreign leaders who are grappling with North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal as part of the so-called six party talks: China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

Bush will also meet Saturday morning with the president of Indonesia, which has been an ally in fighting Islamic terrorism since the bombing of a Bali nightclub in 2002.

One of the two leader “retreats” of the APEC summit is to focus on the issue of “human security.” The senior administration official noted last year’s wide ranging agreement on fighting terrorism, and annual discussions on halting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

He said U.S. officials found it very encouraging that security issues “are initiatives coming out of Beijing or Tokyo or Canberra or Jakarta. They’re coming from across the region, and there’s now a real buy-in to this mission for APEC.”

Yet officials have also noticed an undercurrent of grumbling that the security agenda, while of utmost interest to the world’s superpower, may be drawing attention from economic development concerns that are at the top of the agenda of less well-off nations.

“The ‘have nots’ are perhaps a little more interested in development, and the ‘haves’ in self protection,” said an official of one southeast Asian country, who asked to remain unidentified.

In their one-on-one sessions this weekend, U.S. officials will also be offering encouraging words to countries such as South Korea and Japan, which have provided troops for Iraq at a time when some nations have been pulling out of the country in the face of increasing danger for troops and civilians alike.

On Thursday, the group’s foreign ministers reached agreement to take steps to prevent the manufacture and spread of shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles. The missiles, such as U.S.-made Stingers, are blamed for dozens of attacks on civilian aircraft, and officials are worried that they are an increasing threat in the hands of terrorist groups.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the focus Thursday was on the small missiles, but added that there was also a broader focus on “export controls, and in particular export controls on materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction.”

A joint statement from the foreign ministers said they would work to eliminate the threat of unconventional weapons proliferation, and would develop guidelines to enable the countries to monitor the movement of the missiles.

Downer said “there was general agreement that all of us in the region had to put increasing pressure on the North Koreans to participate in the six party talks.”

The most consequential meetings may be those that deal with North Korea. After three earlier meetings, the group talks have been stalled in recent months by the North Koreans. It is widely believed that Pyongyang had wanted a delay to see if Democratic Sen. John Kerry would win the White House from the presumably harder-line Bush.

In these meetings, U.S. officials will be able to take the temperature of their allies, who have been intermittently suggesting that the United States should ease up on its insistence that it will not offer concessions to Pyongyang until the dictatorship carries out a permanent and verifiable dismantling of its nuclear weapons program.

In Seoul today, the Associated Press reported that Gen. Leon J. LaPorte, the top U.S. military commander in South Korea, warned that North Korea might sell weapons-grade plutonium to terrorists for much-needed cash, a move that would be “disastrous for the world.”

Powell earlier this week suggested a glimmer of hope, in signs that the North Koreans might be backing off their insistence that the nuclear issue should be solved one on one.

“We have seen a few signals coming out of North Korea where they have said, ‘No, we never insisted that it had to be solved in a bilateral way.’ We’ll have to wait and see.”

Powell said the meetings might produce important information on what Chinese and South Korean officials have learned on the North Koreans’ intentions in recent days.

He hinted that some new action might be forthcoming from the North Koreans because they have had time to study the allies’ proposal, and “the election is now over.”

In addition to their talks on security issues, the ministers this week declared their support for the swift resolution of talks aimed at a new World Trade Organization trade liberalization agreement. They also set guidelines to limit the spread of regional or bilateral trade agreements, and called for reforms to reduce graft and increase government openness.

Times special correspondent Eva Vergara contributed to this story.