Envoys meet on strategy for North Korean arms talks

Negotiators from Japan, South Korea and the US met today to co-ordinate strategy for talks this month aimed at pressuring North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, after the North’s leader said a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula was his father’s dying wish.

North Korea agreed on Saturday to end a 13-month boycott of the talks, after being assured by the chief US nuclear envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, that Washington recognised its sovereignty.

Hill met in Seoul today with the South’s nuclear negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, and Kenichiro Sasae, director of the Asia and Oceania Bureau at Japan’s Foreign Ministry. They will head their countries’ delegations at the six-nation arms talks set to convene during the week of July 25, which also include China and Russia.

The three declined to comment to reporters before heading into a meeting at the South Korean Foreign Ministry.

A senior South Korean government official today said that Seoul hoped to change the format for the next nuclear talks, which had previously lasted several days. Instead, the talks could be extended much longer so all sides had a chance to do actual negotiating rather than simply state their positions as in the past

Seoul is hopeful of progress in the next round of arms talks, and the official noted senior North Korean officials appear to be following up on statements by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il – who has repeatedly in the past month mentioned that denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula was the dying wish of his father, North Korea’s founding ruler Kim Il Sung.

Kim repeated the comment to a visiting Chinese envoy yesterday, and said he “hoped that the six-party talks would be resumed as scheduled and positive progress be made at the talks,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported today.

South Korea has offered extensive energy aid to the North if it gives up its atomic weapons, and the US has also promised diplomatic recognition and economic aid to the communist state if international inspectors verify the arms programs are completely dismantled.

Yesterday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on Noth Korea to agree at the talks to scrap its nuclear programs.

“We look forward to a strategic decision by the North Koreans to abandon their nuclear weapons,” Rice said in Seoul, her last stop on an Asian tour.

The latest nuclear stand-off with North Korea was sparked in late 2002 after US officials accused it of a running a secret uranium enrichment program. The North subsequently pulled out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and in February claimed it had nuclear weapons.