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IAEA presses Iran, N Korea to come clean on nukes

AFP, Vienna
UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei urged Iran yesterday to come clean on its contested atomic drive and North Korea not to resume its own nuclear activities as international disarmament talks founder.
*1 urge Iran to implement all the transparency measures... required to build confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme at the earliest possible date." ElBaradei said in his opening address to the International Atomic Energy Agency's general conference here.
11115 will be good for Iran, good for the Middle East region and good for the whole world."
Despite six years of intensive investigation, the IAEA has so far been unable to determine whether Iran’s nuclear activities are purely peaceful as Tehran claims.
ElBaradei added. "I still hope that conditions can be created for the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) to return to the Non-Proliferation Treaty at the earliest possible date.'
Last week, North Korea announced it was preparing to restart a nuclear reprocessing plant used to make weapons-grade material, asking the IAEA to remove seals and surveillance equipment and barring agency inspectors from the site.
Under a six-country pact announced in February 2007, North Korea agreed to disable and dismantle key nuclear facilities and allow inspectors to return in return for one million tonnes of fuel aid and its removal from a US list of countries supporting terrorism.
But North Korea announced last month it had halted the process in protest at Washington's refusal to drop it from the blacklist as had been promised.
Speaking on behalf of the European Union, French government spokesman Luc Chatel said the onus was on Iran to shed light on its nuclear programme, "open the doors of its installations, provide access to individuals and documents and reply to all of the inspectors' questions.”
Chatel also called on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, as
required by the UN Security Council.
At the same time he urged North Korea to "dismantle its nuclear installations in a verifiable and irreversible manner and to abandon its arms-grade fissile material."
And he said that the EU was "concerned" that Syria had not yet responded to IAEA requests to visit suspect nuclear sites.
The 27-bloc "urges Syria to prove all the access requested and reply to all the agency's questions," Chatel said.
The United States has alleged Syria was building a covert nuclear facility at a remote desert site called Al-Kibar until it was destroyed by Israeli bombs in September 2007.
Damascus allowed a three-member team from the IAEA to visit Al-Kibar in June, but has since refused any follow-up visit.
Official requests to visit other sites allegedly involved in clandestine nuclear activities have so far gone unanswered.
The IAEA's 145 member countries were gathered in Vienna for the 52nd general conference, an
annual week-long meeting to draw up general policies on a range of issues, from non-proliferation and nuclear terrorism to medical applications of nuclear technology.
This year, however, a key issue could be the possible candidature of either Syria or Iran for a seat on the IAEA’s 35-member board following the expiry of Pakistan's one-year term.
The seat is to be allocated to another country within the so-called Middle East and South Asia (MESA) group. Diplomats close to the IAEA have told AFP there are four possible candidates: Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Kazakhstan.
MESA has until the end of the general conference to decide on a single candidate and the choice is normally adopted by consensus.
With both Iran and Syria currently in the dock over their purported clandestine nuclear work, the nomination of either by MESA would almost certainly run into resistance, diplomats said. '
That could mean that a vote would have to be called at the conference, unprecedented in the IAEA's history.