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U.S. Nuclear Negotiator Hopes to Meet With North Korean Officials Before Next Round of Talks
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said yesterday he plans to meet with North Korean officials before the six-nation talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear program resume in November, the Yonhap news agency reported (see GSN, Sept. 26). “I look forward to meeting all the parties and I look forward at some point to meeting the North Koreans before we get going again in November,” Agence France-Presse quoted Hill as saying. “I am obviously going to be very focused in the coming weeks of consulting with other partners and that could well include North Korea but I haven’t made any travel plans yet,” Hill said (Yonhap, Sept. 27). Japan will not discuss North Korea’s demand for a nuclear energy reactor until Pyongyang completely dismantles its nuclear weapons program, a Japanese Embassy official in Washington told the Associated Press yesterday. The official, who participated in the last round of multilateral negotiations in Beijing, said North Korea must also return to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and install nuclear safeguards before Tokyo would commence any discussion of the light-water reactor issue (Foster Klug, Associated Press/Santa Fe New Mexican, Sept. 26). South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon today expressed hope for the next round of talks, Yonhap reported. “There is a lot of talk about a specific implementation plan,” Ban said. “When we look at the negotiating process, however, we don’t have to worry.” “I think we can draw up a specific implementation plan through the six-party talks,” he said (Associated Press, Sept. 27). The next round of talks is likely to be the beginning of a long process, one analyst told AP. “This is really just the beginning of the negotiations, if we’re lucky,” said former U.S. diplomat Robert Galucci. “But we have to start someplace.” For the negotiations to succeed, the United States must offer Pyongyang more incentives, such as lifting economic sanctions, removing the country from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and resuming oil shipments, said Selig Harrison, Asia program director at the Center for International Policy. “If the U.S. is willing to offer sufficiently attractive inducements ... I don’t think that North Korea will hold up future progress in order to get a commitment for a reactor right away,” he said (Burt Herman, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Sept. 27).
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