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| Monday, 1 March 2004 |
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N. Korea talks end with deep divisions laid bare BEIJING, Sunday (Reuters) Six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis ended without a breakthrough but a senior U.S. official said the meetings had advanced Washington's agenda of disarming Pyongyang. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing closed the four-day session saying all sides had agreed to set up a working group and hold the next set of talks in Beijing before the end of June. "Differences, even serious differences, still exist," Li said at the closing ceremony, without specifying what gaps remained. China's chief negotiator, Wang Yi, cited an "extreme lack of trust" between the U.S. and North Koreans and said further discussions were needed on the scope of both the North's proposal to freeze its nuclear programs and the U.S. demand for dismantling all atomic arms schemes. But a senior U.S. official declared the talks, which also involved South Korea, Japan and Russia "very successful," saying all but Pyongyang had agreed to the goal of a nuclear-free North. In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was also upbeat despite acknowledging that "key differences remain." He said in a statement the United States welcomed the results of "very serious discussions" and cited as progress the agreements to make the talks more regular. Russia's chief delegate, Alexander Losyukov, said the talks achieved "modest" results. But he called the working groups "a reasonable base for the continuation of discussions of those problems arising from the different positions." China's Li said the second round featured substantial dialogue and made "a big step forward." There was little evidence the gulf between North Korea and the United States had narrowed. In the end they settled on a chairman's summary statement instead of a joint declaration. "They (the Americans) haven't succeeded, but they haven't failed and they can always say that the process is under way," said Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley. North Korea, whose 11th-hour rejection of language in a proposed agreement prolonged the talks for hours and prevented the parties from signing a joint declaration, repeated its denial that it had an enriched uranium weapons program. "We believe the insistence of the raising of the HEU (highly enriched uranium) issue by the U.S. side is very much related to the position of the U.S. Bush administration, who based this assertion on false information," Kim Gye-gwan, head of the North Korean delegation, told reporters after the talks. The crux of the dispute and the reason for the six-party talks is a U.S. accusation - which Pyongyang denies - that North Korea is pursuing a uranium enriching program for bombs. The U.S. official in Beijing brushed off the denials but a Japanese diplomat said the United States had not shown any evidence the North had such a program. The U.S. official said the American goal of completely dismantling all of the North's nuclear arms programs had "essentially been accepted by all of the participants except the DPRK." DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "The DPRK did say and has said that it will dismantle its nuclear programs. The devil, of course, is in the details," said the official. Asked about the North's offer to give up its military nuclear program but not its peaceful one, the official said: "The problem is, I am not aware of any peaceful programs in the DPRK." Japan chief negotiator Mitoji Yabunaka voiced support for the U.S. goal of a eliminating the North's nuclear programs, which he said were a "grave threat to our country." The North wants aid and a security guarantee in return for a nuclear freeze. "When we freeze nuclear activities I believe it will be followed by inspections. When, who and how we do the inspections will be determined in future talks," said Kim. Officials in Washington said U.S. negotiators outlined a series of coordinated steps that Washington could take if the North agreed to the complete dismantling of its nuclear programs. Initially, aid would come in the form of energy assistance from other parties to the talks, but the United States would be at the table, the officials said. |
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