N Korea ready to close reactor
2007-03-20 19:22
Beijing - North Korea is ready to shut down its key nuclear reactor and allow UN inspectors back, said China on Tuesday, despite its refusal to budge until $25m in frozen assets is returned.
Envoys for the Stalinist regime said they would not make any further moves at disarmament talks in Beijing until the money has been transferred into one of its bank accounts.
It forced the host country China to postpone Tuesday afternoon's scheduled plenary session, although the chief North Korean and US negotiators did meet bilaterally.
Reporting "good progress" at six-nation disarmament talks, China's foreign ministry earlier said the North had indicated it would abide by an accord last month under which it agreed to close its Yongbyon reactor.
"We found that North Korea is ready to shut down and seal the facility in Yongbyon and accept the monitoring and supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency," said foreign ministry spokesperson Liu Jianchao.
Liu did not give a specific timeframe, but referred to a February 13 deal which commits North Korea to closing Yongbyon and allowing IAEA inspectors in by mid-April in return for 50 000 tonnes of fuel aid.
'Favourable conditions'
Liu said the latest round of the six-nation talks - which involve China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia - had made a good start during Monday's first day.
This "creates favourable conditions for more progress on the implementation of further steps in the six-party talks process," he said.
The talks had begun on an optimistic note following an announcement by the United States that it had struck a deal with North Korea to end a long-running financial sanctions dispute that had hampered progress.
Releasing assets
Under that agreement, the US treasury said that about $25m of North Korean funds could be released from a Macau bank, where they had been frozen since 2005 amid allegations of counterfeiting and money laundering.
Liu's comments were the first time since then that anyone involved in the talks has directly said the North is ready to close Yongbyon.
However, neither the United States nor Macau has given a timeframe for the release of the money, and North Korea insisted on Tuesday that it would not move forward on the wider talks until the cash was back in its coffers.
Kenichiro Sasae, Japan's top nuclear negotiator, said: "According to the chairperson, China, North Korea says they will not come to the gathering until they confirm the transfer of the money."
Money 'delivered soon'
But a South Korean diplomat involved in the Beijing talks said Christopher Hill and Kim Kye-Gwan, respectively the chief US and North Korean negotiators, met for their own bilateral talks on Tuesday, and that the money was expected to be delivered very soon.
"We expect to smoothly wrap up various procedures related to the unfreezing of the frozen bank accounts," said South Korean deputy negotiator Lim Sung-Nam.