New push to bring NKorea back to nuclear talks

SEOUL: A new effort to revive multinational talks on North Korea's nuclear disarmament is due to start this week, but hopes of saving the breakthrough accord reached on September 19 last year are fading.              

 

Officials and analysts are pessimistic about restarting the six-nation forum, which the reclusive communist state has boycotted for 10 months in protest at US financial sanctions.            

 

"It is too early to give it a death sentence but we are running out of time," said Kim Sung-Han of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security.      

 

"We have reached a critical juncture," he said.

 

"Where we are now is the result of the US agreement to South Korea's proposal to utilize patience one more time to give it a last chance."       

 

South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun and US President George W. Bush recommitted themselves to try to restart the dialogue at their summit in Washington on Thursday.        

 

But Roh's security advisor Suh Choo-Suk has acknowledged it will be an "extremely difficult task."          

 

Last September the United States, the two Koreas, China, Russia and Japan signed what was seen as a landmark accord on ending the North's nuclear arms programme -- an issue which brought the US and North Korea close to war in 1994.      

 

In return the North was to receive energy and economic aid, eventual diplomatic benefits and security guarantees. But the jubilation was short-lived. Just two month later North Korea boycotted the talks to protest at US sanctions on a Macau bank which allegedly helped it pass counterfeit US dollars and launder funds.       

 

Tensions rose with the North's defiant missile tests in July, which sparked condemnation and missile-related sanctions from the UN Security Council.            

 

Media reports say the North, which declared in February 2005 it had built nuclear weapons, may also be planning an atomic weapons test.     

 

Neither Washington nor Pyongyang have shown any sign of yielding.        

 

Washington says its financial sanctions are unrelated to the six-party forum and the North should return to dialogue unconditionally.   

 

"Our country will never return to the talks under US sanctions," North Korea's number two Kim Yong Nam told the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana on Saturday.          

 

South Korea's top nuclear envoy Chun Yung-Woo and his US counterpart Christopher Hill will meet in New York this week to follow up on the presidential summit, security advisor Suh has said. The meeting will be followed by a meeting between Chun, Hill and their Japanese counterpart next week.     

 

Despite the apparent summit harmony, the policy gap between Seoul and Washington -- said by one US senior official to be "as wide as the Sea of Japan" -- is complicating diplomatic efforts.           

 

Some analysts believe Washington is close to giving up on the six-party process and announcing new bilateral sanctions. South Korea aims to continue aid to, and investment in, its neighbor to woo it out of isolation.      

 

Two senior US experts on Korea said in an opinion piece in the Washington Post this month that Washington would be making a "grave mistake" in imposing new sanctions.        

 

Donald Gregg and Don Oberdorfer said this may only push Kim Jong-Il's regime to attempt more tests, possibly including nuclear weapons, and ignite serious political and military tensions in the region.     

 

"Why, at such a time, choose sanctions, a policy option whose historical record is overwhelmingly one of failure?" they wrote.    

 

"One possible reason is that sanctions give vent to the visceral hostility that senior Bush administration officials feel toward North Korea."    

 

The State Department disputed the argument as wrongfully blaming the United States for provocation by another state.