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North Korea Seeks Direct Talks With U.S.
North Korea said it will boycott nuclear disarmament talks unless the top negotiators from Pyongyang and Washington are allowed to meet bilaterally, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 2). Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper quoted diplomatic sources in Washington as saying the State Department had received the request for a meeting between Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and North Korean negotiator Kim Kye Gwan (Reuters, Dec. 4). Hill said the multilateral negotiations should continue, but only if they advance a resolution to the nuclear crisis. “I don’t want to threaten walkout,” Hill told the Associated Press on Friday. “But I do have to see progress.” He added that he hoped the nuclear issue would be resolved within months, rather than years. “We can’t just sit there stalemated session after stalemated session,” he said. “If there is a value to the talks we will keep on talking,” he added (Barry Schweid, Associated Press/Washington Post, Dec. 3). Meanwhile, South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young urged the United States today to hold direct talks with Pyongyang on its missile development, alleged currency counterfeiting and other non-nuclear issues, AP reported. Washington’s non-nuclear complaints against North Korea “should be solved by bilateral talks between the two parties,” Chung was quoted by the Yonhap news agency as saying. “As the six-party talks focus on resolving the nuclear issue, other matters should be separated from the six-party issue” (Jae-Soon Chang, Associated Press/Washington Post, Dec. 5).
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