North Korea Denies Diversion of U.N. Funds

North Korea today denied a U.S. allegation that it had diverted funds from the U.N. Development Program to its nuclear weapons effort and other activities, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Jan. 22).

“The United States is kicking up another anti-D.P.R.K. racket over not much aid funds of the UNDP from the outset of the year to meet its dirty political aims,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Mark Wallace, a U.S. official at the United Nations, said that North Korea since 1998 had “systematically perverted” aid funds “for the benefit of the Kim Jong Il regime, rather than for the people of North Korea.”  The United States claimed that millions of dollars had been misused.

The spokesman said the claims were developed by hard-liners in the Bush administration to undermine meetings last week in Berlin between U.S. and North Korean nuclear negotiators.  U.S. hard-liners are also to blame for financial sanctions against Pyongyang that were instituted shortly after its September 2005 pledge to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, the spokesman said.

Pyongyang used those sanctions as justification for abandoning the six-party talks on its nuclear program for 13 months.  Upon rejoining negotiations last month, North Korean negotiators demanded to address the sanctions before discussing the nuclear standoff.  The meetings ended without signs of progress in disarming the Stalinist state (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Jan. 25).

Officials from the negotiating nations have expressed optimism that the next set of talks would produce more favorable results.  The United States has proposed that the six-party talks resume next week, and that separate meetings on the sanctions be conducted concurrently, Kyodo News reported.  North Korea reportedly prefers that the nuclear talks come the week after the sanctions session.  They agree that both sets of negotiations should be held in Beijing, sources said (Kyodo News/Yahoo!News, Jan. 24).

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