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Seoul Urges North Korea, US to Resolve Issues Through Bilateral Talks

Posted on: Monday, 5 December 2005, 06:00 CST

Text of report in English by South Korean news agency Yonhap

Seoul, 5 December: The South Korean government will continue to pursue a peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear dispute, but Pyongyang and Washington have a number of bilateral issues that need to be resolved via separate talks, South Korea's point man on North Korea said Monday [5 December].

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said the six-party nuclear disarmament talks will focus on resolving the nuclear dispute as intended, claiming other issues facing the United States and the North must be resolved through separate bilateral or multilateral talks.

In a special lecture for a group of graduate students from Seoul's Korea University, the unification minister said the most urgent issue facing the United States and the North was the latter's missile development programme.

He said the sides will also have to resolve disputes over the North's biological and chemical weapons and other conventional arms, as well as the issue of North Korean human rights and the North's alleged involvement in international trafficking of drugs and counterfeit bills.

The remarks came amid efforts to set a date for the resumption of the recessed round of the six-nation nuclear talks that are attended by the United States, Japan, China, Russia and the two Koreas.

A Japanese newspaper reported Sunday that Pyongyang has already notified Washington of its intention to boycott future negotiations over its nuclear programme to protest what it claims to be a US- imposed economic sanction against its communist regime.

Tension between the United States and the North escalated following a US accusation that the communist state was using a Macao- based bank for money laundering, and a subsequent freeze of US- based assets of eight North Korean firms believed to be engaged in weapons trafficking.

South Korea's chief negotiator to the six-party talks acknowledged that the North has expressed its intention to link the bilateral issue to the six-nation negotiations over its nuclear programme.

Song Min-soon, however, said the US-North Korea tension will not have any direct consequence on the six-party talks, saying the North's notified position was not as "conclusive," or final as reported.

In an interview with a local radio station, the deputy foreign minister said the incident may have what he called "indirect consequences" on the six-nation nuclear disarmament talks, but said what he called the "simple collision" between the US and the North will not prevent the resumption of six-party talks.

Also refuting the Japanese report that the North intends to boycott a working-level meeting of negotiators involved in the six- nation nuclear talks in the South Korean resort island of Jeju, Song said the meeting is likely to take place before the end of the year.

Proposed by Seoul, the Jeju meeting aims to fine-tune the agenda and date for the fifth round of the six-party talks that recessed before the start of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the South Korean city of Pusan last month.

Source: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

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