North Korea, Iran say they will continue nuclear efforts

In an announcement likely to set up a collision with the United States, North Korea announced Monday that it will continue to demand the right
to "peaceful" use of atomic energy. CNN reports that the six-nation
talks - which also include China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea - resumed Tuesday in Beijing. AFXNews reports that the North Korea statement is the same demand that broke up the talks five weeks ago.

'(North Korea) has a right on peaceful nuclear
activity. This right is neither awarded nor needs to be approved by
others,' the country's chief envoy to the talks, Kim Gye-gwan, told the
official Xinhua news agency at Pyongyang airport.

'We have this right, and the more important thing
is that we should use this right. If the United States tries to set
obstacles to the DPRK's (North Korea) using this right, we can utterly
not accept that.'

Bloomberg News reports that the US rejected North Korea's stance . US chief negotiator Christopher Hill said Monday in Beijing that North Korea's position "does seem to be wrong."

Still, US negotiators said they will renew efforts
to convince North Korea to give up its civilian reactors at the talks.
'I hope the Democratic People's Republic of Korea delegation has done
some homework,' Hill said. 'We had more than four weeks to look at the
text of the proposed agreement.'

The talks will last 'as long as necessary and will not have a deadline,' China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that Iran is "working hard to gather allies"
to defeat a US-European attempt to "refer Tehran to the UN Security
Council because of their fears it may be developing nuclear weapons."

EU diplomats said Iran was focusing its lobbying
efforts on key International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board members
such as China, Russia, India, Pakistan, South Africa and other
non-aligned developing states, which have a good deal of sympathy for
Tehran's arguments.

In the past two weeks, Iran's chief nuclear
negotiator, Ali Larijani, visited Pakistan and India. While
successfully negotiating a deal to allow Iranian natural gas to pass
through Pakistan to India, Xinhua reports he also persuaded both countries to publicly support Tehran's position
for "a peaceful resolution of Iran's nuclear issue and Iran's right to
the peaceful use of nuclear energy in accordance with related
international conventions."

Iran is continuing its diplomatic offensive this
week. Mikhail Zygar and Dmitry Sidorov write in a column for MosNews
that Iranian Vice-President Gholamreza Aghazadeh is in Moscow to
discuss next week's IAEA meeting, where Iran's nuclear program will be
the main topic. Russia has indicated that it will support Iran ,
and fight to keep it from being referred to the UN Security Council,
where it would probably face sanctions. Mr. Zygar and Mr. Sidorov say
this is "an extremely important victory for the Iranians," and a move
likely to "cause the Kremlin a lot of problems."

Russian authorities are relying on the fact that
the world community will not want to punish Iran too severely and that
the Europeans will not vote to transfer the dossier to the UN Security
Council.

Ariel Cohen, an expert with the Heritage
Foundation, who participated in a meeting with Putin, Ivanov and Lavrov
in Moscow, told MosNews that 'on the Iran subject they were telling
mutually exclusive things: from one side - the Russian position is
close to the Europeans', but from the other side - the Kremlin is
against passing the dossier to the UN Security Council.'

According to Cohen's opinion, 'Russia does not want
to spoil its relationship with Iran, because it sees Tehran as a member
of a multi-polar coalition, which also includes China, and plays a role
of the counter-balance for the US.'

Russia has been a nuclear partner with Iran for some years. Russian engineers are currently building a nuclear plant at Bushehr, in southern Iran.

The US, however, is not taking the Iranian
initiative lightly. The New York Times reported last Friday that both
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will speak with
the leaders of these countries during this week's UN summit in New York
in an effort to change their minds on the issue. But experts say their task will not be an easy one.

Lacking a consensus, the United States and its
European allies have shifted strategy and are now trying to get the
matter referred to the Security Council by a simple majority of the
agency's board, a step that officials in Vienna say is without
precedent. North Korea was referred to the United Nations, for example,
by consensus.