N.Korea calls for peace treaty with US to replace armistice

SEOUL, Friday (AFP) - North Korea called Friday for a peace treaty with the United States to replace an armistice signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953.

"The building of a peace mechanism is a process which the DPRK (North Korea) and the US should go through without fail in order to attain the goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula," a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said.

The demand came in the run-up to six-nation talks on dismantling North Korea's nuclear program that are due to resume in Beijing next week.

North Korea is technically still at war with the United States and South Korea, with the 1950-1953 Korean War ending only in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Subsequent negotiations to replace the armistice with a peace mechanism failed amid the lack of trust between the communist state and the United States.

The foreign ministry spokesman said replacing the "fragile" armistice with a lasting peace mechanism was essential for the reunification of North and South Korea and peace between them, and for the security of the whole region.

"Moreover, this presents itself as an issue pending an urgent solution for fairly settling the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the US, a matter of concern of the international community," he was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.

A peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula would lead to an end to the "hostile" US policy toward North Korea, which in turn "automatically result in the denuclearization of the peninsula," he said.

"Successful progress in the process of building a peace mechanism would... give a strong impetus to the process of the soon-to-be-resumed six-party talks aimed to settle the nuclear issue," he said.

Washington on Thursday urged Pyongyang not to set preconditions on the upcoming talks after North Korea said the United States must normalize relations with it for any progress at the meetings starting on July 26.

North Korea said Thursday the United States must also end its "hostile policy" and offer "definite assurance" of non-aggression.

In an interview with China's Xinhua news agency, a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman added that Washington should also delist the Stalinist state as a supporter of terrorism and lift sanctions against it.

Urging North Korea not to set preconditions, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said North Korea should make the "strategic decision" to abandon its nuclear weapons drive for better relations with the United States and the rest of the world.