The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will focus on nuclear issues in Iran, Syria and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) at its board meeting which opened here on Monday.

The just concluded Iranian general election and the political turbulence thereafter has cast a new shadow over Iran's nuclear issue, which frequently tops the agenda of meetings of the 35-member nuclear watchdog.

According to the latest report of IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei on the Iranian nuclear issue, the agency is still not sure whether Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons. But the report pointed out that over the past three months, Iran had been accelerating its uranium enrichment process in spite of international pressure.

Western countries continue to claim that Iran's nuclear program is aimed at producing an atomic bomb, which Iran has firmly denied.

Since taking office in 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never compromised to the West. He succeeded in gaining another term of office in the general election, raising concern among Western countries that Tehran's hard-line nuclear policy is unlikely to change.

The Syrian nuclear issue will also be one of the key topics at the meeting.

In 2007, Israel destroyed a facility in Syria, claiming it to be a base for secret nuclear weapons development.

Although the IAEA found traces of unusual uranium particles at the site and elsewhere in Syria, the source of the particles has not been confirmed so far, and no conclusion has been reached about the nature of the facility.

The DPRK's recent nuclear test again put the Korean nuclear issue under international focus.

El Baradei criticized the DPRK's nuclear test in his opening speech at the meeting, calling it "a wrong step in the wrong direction." He called on all the parties to make diplomatic efforts to pull the DPRK back to the nuclear test-ban treaty.

The IAEA's budget report will also be discussed at the meeting. Sources said that developed countries such as the United States and Britain want zero-growth in the budget, while developing countries insist that the budget should guarantee necessities especially in development assistance. The two parties are expected to have a heated debate on the issue.

The next IAEA director general is another focus of the meeting. In previous test votes, Japanese Ambassador to IAEA, Yukiya Amano, won the most support, but fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority. A consensus may still not be reached at this meeting.

The board meeting will conclude on Friday.

Source: Xinhua