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U.S. Unsure if Deal With North Korea Possible
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the Bush administration’s point man on the North Korea nuclear negotiations, said yesterday it remained unclear whether an agreement on Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions could be reached in the near future, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Aug. 9). “If we don’t get a deal, it won’t be because we haven’t tried,” Hill said. He added that participants in the six-nation talks might meet for informal dialogue prior to the next round, scheduled to begin the week of Aug. 29. That could include bilateral meetings of U.S. and North Korean officials, Hill said. Hill said he could not tell during the recent 13-day negotiating session whether North Korean leaders are sincerely reconciled to relinquishing the nation’s nuclear weapons program. “It’s hard to say,” Hill said. “There were moments when I really thought they were and there were moments when I really thought they weren’t.” “Based on what the [North Korean] negotiators were telling us, it’s a finite number of issues that separate us,” Hill said. “It sounded a little worse right as the negotiations closed because they began to put things on the table which frankly had been resolved, and I’m not too concerned about those things” (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Aug. 9). Chief North Korean negotiator Kim Kye Gwan said yesterday that Washington must accept his country’s right to a nuclear energy program, the New York Times reported. North Korea’s “stand on the nuclear issue is very clear,” Kim said. “Now it’s up to the U.S. to change its policy” (Joel Brinkley, New York Times, Aug. 10). North Korea and the United States must be flexible in the next round of negotiations, Seoul’s top envoy to the talks said yesterday. “You just cannot insist, ‘My position has already been set, so you change your position,’” Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon told MBC radio. He said the last round of discussions had been “too short to wipe out uncertainty in the future and distrust” between the two countries, but added that those talks “laid the basic grounds for producing an agreement, rather than just failed to produce one” (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Aug. 9). South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun today asked his country’s nuclear negotiators to hold bilateral discussions with representatives from other nations during the recess, AP reported (Ji-Soo Kim, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Aug. 10).
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