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Rigid North Korean Stance Stalls Nuclear Talks, U.S. Says

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 August 2005, 15:00 CDT

A senior U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday that the six-party negotiations in Beijing aimed at scrapping North Korea's nuclear weapons programs were so far unable to reach agreement on core negotiating points for future talks because of the North's unwillingness to compromise. "Fundamentally," the U.S. deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, told a news briefing in Beijing, "the sense that I get is that there are five parties that are pretty close to agreement on those principles, and the key question is whether North Korea is willing to make the strategic decision it needs to make to go forward." Zoellick, in Beijing for broad-ranging strategic discussions with China, said he was not part of the talks about disarming North Korea but was in regular contact with the chief U.S. negotiator, Christopher Hill. "It's a difficult process," Zoellick said of the talks, which also involve China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

Zoellick's comments came after a day when the six-party talks appeared increasingly fraught with frustration and uncertainty about their ultimate success. Washington has demanded that Pyongyang agree to end all its nuclear programs, including ostensibly civilian power generation projects, if it wants to receive economic aid and greater political contact with America and its regional allies.

But so far after eight days of talks, North Korean negotiators have refused to concede on the issue, and Pyongyang also announced it wanted to rejoin the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would entitle it to exploit "peaceful" nuclear power. On Tuesday, the chief North Korean negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, said there was "no progress" after long discussions, according to the South Korean Yonhap news agency.

In October 2002, Washington confronted North Korea with charges that Pyongyang had broken the terms of a 1994 disarmament agreement by reprocessing uranium. As part of that agreement, Washington had agreed to help build two light-water nuclear reactors in the North, a design that uses uranium that cannot be upgraded to weapons-level material. But before and during the present talks, Bush administration officials have said the North must now abandon all nuclear ambitions if it wants U.S. rewards and recognition.

Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator, said Tuesday that the talks were by no means assured of reaching agreement on even the broad principles that may guide future talks with Pyongyang. "I need to be very clear that there are a lot of differences between the North Korean side on one hand and everyone else on the other hand," Hill told reporters late on Monday night. "Frankly, we were not able to bridge any differences." The Japanese foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, said in Tokyo that North Korea had rejected U.S. demands to agree in writing to completely terminate all nuclear activities, Reuters reported. North Korea has also raised objections to the U.S. military presence in Japan, the Japanese Kyodo news service reported, citing unnamed Japanese officials in Beijing.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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