Kelly Visits South Korea, Discusses Potential Deal for Pyongyang

South Korean and U.S. officials met today to continue drafting a security guarantee that they could offer North Korea when multilateral talks on the Korean nuclear crisis resume (see GSN, Nov. 19).

James Kelly, the top U.S. envoy to Asia, and South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck spent two hours poring over the proposed document.

“They are discussing detailed wording,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Kim Sun-heung. The process, Kim said, was in the “early stages” (Charles Whelan, Agence France-Presse, Nov. 20).

North Korean officials, meanwhile, told the executive director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization that Pyongyang wants compensation for the stoppage of work on two nuclear power plants (see GSN, Nov. 13). Charles Kartman, who visited Pyongyang earlier this week, rejected the demand, saying that North Korea initially violated the 1994 agreement that provided for the power plants. He said also that the work had been suspended, not terminated, Yonhap News Agency reported (Yonhap News Agency/BBC Monitoring, Nov. 20).

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