US to take N Korea off terror blacklist

The US is working with North Korea to remove it from Washington’s blacklist of states sponsoring terrorism as American experts prepare to start disabling the Communist nation’s nuclear reactor, a top US diplomat said today.

Taking Pyongyang off the terror list, long a key demand of the North, was one of a series of economic and political concessions offered for the country to disable its nuclear reactor that produces plutonium for bombs.

“We’re in the middle of that work with the (North) with the understanding that the (North) wants to get off the list and we also want to get them off the list,” US assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill said in Seoul.

Hill arrived yesterday from Beijing where he met his North Korean counterpart, vice foreign minister Kim Kye Gwan.

The American envoy said the North should accede “to all UN covenants and international standards on terrorism” to prove that the country was “no longer engaged in any terrorism acts, no longer is providing assistance to terrorist groups”.

The North was put on the terror list for its involvement in the 1987 bombing of a South Korean jet that killed all 115 people aboard.

The designation effectively bars the North from taking out low-interest loans from US-controlled international lenders. Pyongyang has long demanded it be taken off the list, calling it as a sign of US hostility towards the regime.

Hill said the US team of nuclear experts, who arrived in Pyongyang yesterday, was expected to travel to the North’s main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, to start disabling the country’s sole functioning reactor there and two other facilities.

The North already shut down the reactor in July, and promised to disable it by year’s end in exchange for energy aid and political concessions from its negotiating counterparts – the US, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

Disabling the reactor would mark the furthest step that the North has taken to scale back its nuclear program. The country conducted its first nuclear test in October of last year.

Hill said it would take at least a year for the North to restart the reactor once disablement is completed, but that it was only the beginning of the disarmament process.

“What we would like for disablement to do is lead into a seamless process of dismantlement,” Hill said.

“Disablement essentially makes it difficult and makes it costly to go back on the agreement.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said US president George Bush’s administration hoped the deal would lead to complete North Korean disarmament.

“That is where we are working towards, and we expect that they will fulfil their part of the bargain,” Perino said.

“If they don’t, then we won’t have to fulfil our part, either.”