North Korea rejoins nuclear talks

2005-07-09 21:52

Seoul - North Korea agreed on Saturday to return to six-way nuclear crisis talks in the last week of July, state media said, reviving efforts to convince the communist state to abandon its nuclear weapons drive.

The agreement was made at a meeting in Beijing between the chief negotiators from North Korea and the United States, the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency said.

"Both sides agreed to open the fourth round of the six-party talks in the week which begins on July 25," the agency said.

US officials travelling with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Beijing confirmed the meeting.

"North Korea confirmed that the meeting will be held and also agreed that the objective of the talks is denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and they wanted to come to make progress," a US administration official said.

North Korea has boycotted the talks, which also group South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, since a third round in June 2004, citing "hostile" US policy.

Pyongyang agreed to return to talks after US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill met with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye Gwan, KCNA said.

"The US side clarified its official stand to recognise the DPRK (North Korea) as a sovereign state, not to invade it and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks," it said.

"The DPRK side interpreted the US side's expression of its stand as a retraction of its remark designating the former as an 'outpost of tyranny' and decided to return to the six-party talks."

In the past several months, the United States and other dialogue partners have stepped up diplomacy to bring the defiant North back to disarmament talks.

Last month North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il told a South Korean envoy his country would come back as early as July if the United States "recognises and respects" his country as a dialogue partner.

The nuclear stand-off flared in October 2002 when Washington accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons programme based on enriched uranium in violation of a 1994 agreement.

On February 10 this year, North Korea announced it had nuclear weapons.

The United States has proposed that Pyongyang dismantle all its nuclear programmes before receiving security assurances and other economic benefits from Washington.

- AFP