THE Philippines being a member of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), I have instructed our post in Vienna to support a strong resolution urging the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) to abandon its acknowledged nuclear weapons development program. North Korea has defiantly destroyed the seals placed by IAEA inspectors and removed the cameras monitoring its nuclear plants in the city of Yongbyon.

The latest dispatches from Pyongyang even hinted at the imminent expulsion of UN inspectors from North Korean soil.
A 1994 agreement established the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), a US-led international consortium in New York designed to help the DPRK replace its heavy nuclear reactors with light-water reactors which cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium. Following North Korea's shock admission of its nuclear weapons program, KEDO decided to suspend oil shipments starting from December. It seems the stoppage of the oil supply has goaded the North Koreas all the more to reactivate their idled nuclear plants.

Fortunately, the states directly threatened, South Korea, Japan and China, have called for sobriety and calm. But a military source in Washington D.C. had warned that the United States, which had branded North Korea as part of the "axis of evil" together with Iraq and Iran, in the global fight against terrorism, was capable of fighting a war on two fronts or in both the Middle East and Asia. This is no more braggadocio. For the past two decades, at the height of the Cold War, and in the post-Cold War era, US war colleges and strategic planners have been dealing with the issue of two-front wars.

When Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov recently called on me in the Department of Foreign Affairs, I raised the North Korea nuclear issue with him. Ivanov categorically stated that the issue must be addressed vigorously through diplomatic dialogue, not through violent confrontation.

The problem is that the North Korean leadership, headed by the mysterious Kim Jong-Il, son of the late Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, is deemed to be highly unpredictable. He has a millionstrong army deployed at the Panmunjon ceasefire line, facing 650,000 South Korean troops and 37,000 American troops and a smattering of other nation's troops which fought the Korean war in 1950 under the flag of the United Nations. While in Seoul some years ago, I laid a wreath at the elegant monument to the gallant Filipino troops that fought in the war under the UN flag.

One reason the United States has refused to ratify the landmark international convention against land mines is that at this truce line, we have the world's most heavily mined no man's land, intended to deter a sudden North Korean attack.

The IAEA board is meeting in Vienna on Jan. 6. The meeting will give North Korea a last chance to review its decision to restart its nuclear arms development program, in violation of its 1994 undertaking to the international community and its non-nuclear proliferation obligation. If the dialogue is not successful, the issue will most probably be raised to the United Nations Security Council, which is still grappling with the Iraq issue. It is possible the United States will seek an Asian counterpart of Security Resolution 1441, which will require North Korea to disarm or face the consequences.

There should be no under alarm over the Korean Peninsula situation, but at the Department of Foreign Affairs, I have already given instructions for contingency planning over the safety of some 40,000 Filipino expatriates working in South Korea. Such is the extent of our global responsibilities, with over seven million Filipinos working abroad in 140 countries, some of which are historically trouble-prone areas.