China, U.S. Meet on North Korea

Senior U.S. State Department officials continued their Asian travels today, meeting with Chinese diplomats in Beijing to discuss strategies on resolving the North Korean nuclear standoff, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Nov. 7).

“We’re very interested in talking about what we can do to defuse the problem of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and to work together, China and the United States, toward achieving denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns as he met with Deputy Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo.

Burns and fellow Undersecretary Robert Joseph have already met with officials in Japan and South Korea.

North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju was also reported to be in Beijing yesterday for talks with Foreign Ministry officials.  He then left for Russia, according to South Korean media (Associated Press I, Nov. 8).

U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt said the department would conduct further talks with North Korean officials regarding Pyongyang’s frozen accounts in a Macau bank, Agence France-Presse reported today.  Pyongyang has used U.S. financial sanctions as a justification for refusing to return to the six-party talks on its nuclear program, though it has recently indicated its intention to resume negotiations.

“This will be a continuation of talks we had with the North Koreans that began in New York in March of this year,” Kimmitt said in Seoul.

The frozen assets at Banco Delta Asia are not sanctions, but rather “law enforcement measures under the laws of the U.S. and other jurisdictions,’ Kimmitt said. 

U.S. officials believe the accounts are connected to counterfeiting of U.S. currency and other financial misdeeds by Pyongyang.  South Korean media reported last week that as much as half of the frozen $24 million came from legal sources, according to AFP (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Nov. 8).

U.S. scholars and former officials were in Pyongyang last week for meetings with Foreign Ministry and Yongbyon nuclear reactor officials, the Yonhap News Agency reported.  It was the first such visit since North Korea’s Oct. 9 nuclear test.

Visitors from Oct. 31 to Nov. 4 included former U.S. envoy to North Korea Jack Pritchard, former Los Alamos National Laboratory chief Siegfried Hecker, and former State Department intelligence and research head Robert Carlin.  They are expected to give a news briefing on the trip on Nov. 15 (Yonhap News Agency, Nov. 8).

Meanwhile, Japan today announced that it, like South Korea and the United States, would not recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons power, AP reported.

Foreign Minister Taro Aso agreed to that stance while talking by telephone with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  They also agreed to informally discuss the nuclear situation with Chinese, Russian and South Korean diplomats during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum this month in Vietnam.

Tokyo has also prepared a list of 20 luxury goods that can no longer be exported to North Korea, in line with the resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council last month to punish Pyongyang for its nuclear test.  Banned items could include cars, watches, cigarettes, jewelry and perfume, AP reported (Associated Press II, Nov. 8).

Ending North Korea’s nuclear program will not be easy, but the international community must hold together to meet that goal, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.

“One of the tragedies of North Korea is the state of its economy and its people and the misery that they live under,” he said, according to the London Times.  “I’m afraid … that it’s only when such a regime is prepared to embrace the modern world in a full way that they’ve got the motivation to make the changes in terms of its stance on weapons of mass destruction.  So I think it’s going to be very tough with North Korea.”

“The one thing I think you can be sure of in a situation like this is that the only language that will be understood by the North Korean regime is one of firmness. … The firmer we are, the more likely we are to succeed,” he said (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times, Nov. 8).

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