Few Signs of Progress in Nuclear Talks

"Koreas"

07/29/2005

BEIJING (AP) - The top U.S. envoy pledged Friday to keep at nuclear talks with North Korea as long as necessary, meeting again with the North’s delegate as negotiations stretched into the longest round since the six-nation process began.

All six chief delegates met Friday afternoon and agreed to continue the talks Saturday, said Cho Tae-yong, the No. 2 South Korean delegate. The top delegates will “seriously discuss how to push forward this round of talks,” Cho said of the Saturday session.

Despite the apparent impasse at the talks after a record fourth day - the previous rounds never exceeded three days - he said Friday’s meetings “were not lower than my expectation.”

“It’s too early to pack or draw conclusions,” said Cho, head of the Foreign Ministry’s task force on the North Korea nuclear issue.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill held a one-on-one meeting Friday morning with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan for about 90 minutes, a South Korean official said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the continuing talks.

No results of the meeting - their fourth direct talks this week - were immediately known. China’s state Xinhua News Agency reported that the two would meet again Saturday, citing unnamed sources.

No deadline has been set for the nuclear talks in the Chinese capital to wrap up, unlike other sessions. The talks that began Tuesday are the fourth round in which China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States have come together since 2003 to press North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions.

“We’ll just keep at it just as long as it’s useful to keep at it. I’ve got plenty of patience,” Hill said Friday before his meeting with the North Koreans.

He said the meeting was to focus on discussions of “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula - the buzzword of the negotiations, whose definition remains a point of contention.

Most of the negotiations between the United States and North Korea have lasted for three days or less - Aug. 27-29, 2003; Feb. 25-28, 2004, and June 23-26, 2004 - but in 1994, United States and North Korea held several weeks of nuclear negotiations.

North Korea is insisting the United States remove any nuclear weapons from South Korea as well as its “nuclear umbrella” of security guarantees to its ally, while others say denuclearization means just getting rid of nuclear weapons from North Korea. The United States denies it has any nuclear weapons in South Korea, and has refused to make any concessions until the North is certified as nuclear-free and inspectors can monitor that it stays that way.

“We had some of their ideas which we did not feel were usable, but we had some of their ideas that very much correspond to some of the ideas we have,” Hill said of his previous meetings with the North. “We’ll have to wait and see how it goes.”

There were no breakthroughs in the earlier six-nation talks, and many delegates said they didn’t expect any in this round, which convened after a 13-month hiatus during which the North refused to attend, citing “hostile” U.S. policies. Most parties have said they hope merely to set a date for a fifth session.

Russia’s top envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev, has said he will leave Beijing on Saturday but that the talks could continue - an indication negotiations might be winding down or will proceed with lower-level officials.

The increased contacts at this round between North Korea and the United States - which remain technically at war with some 32,500 U.S. troops based in South Korea - have raised hopes for progress in the standoff.

Despite the meetings with the North Koreans, the United States ruled out negotiating a bilateral agreement.

“That approach was tried and it failed,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Thursday, referring to a 1994 pact that collapsed after U.S. officials claim North Korea admitted running a secret uranium enrichment program in late 2002. The North later pulled out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarted its main nuclear reactor, spawning the current nuclear crisis.