S. Korea, U.S. call for progress at nuclear talks

[imText1]After succeeding in coaxing North Korea back to the dialogue table, South Korea and the United States swiftly shifted their focus onto how to make progress once the long-stalled nuclear disarmament talks resume.

On Saturday night, North Korea said it would rejoin negotiations on its nuclear program in the final week of July, a breakthrough that ended a yearlong impasse in the process of resolving the most critical security concern in Northeast Asia.

South Korea, the United States and other concerned countries welcomed the North’s decision, but they also stressed that the real task still lies ahead.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a trip to Beijing, said the North’s decision is “only the first step” and the “real issue is to make progress in the talks.” She said her Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, agreed with that view.

“It is not the goal of the talks to have talks, it is the goal of the talks to make progress,” Rice was quoted as saying.

On Sunday, North Korea issued a backup statement, with an unidentified Foreign Ministry spokesman saying that his country is firmly committed to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.

The remark contrasted with an earlier North Korean demand that the six-party talks should be turned into arms reduction talks since the country already possesses atomic bombs.

The demand has been considered a major hurdle for progress in the nuclear negotiations. Given Sunday’s statement, however, North Korea is believed to have withdrawn the demand.

“The resumption of six-way talks is important itself but the key is to make substantial progress by holding in-depth discussions in realizing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the spokesman said.

South Korea also welcomed the North’s decision to return to the dialogue table and stressed the need for “substantial progress.”

“Once the talks resume, participants in the six-party talks should conduct serious and earnest talks so as to achieve substantial progress in resolving the nuclear issue and making the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons,” the Foreign Ministry said.

A senior Seoul official was more specific about how to try to move the sensitive negotiations forward, saying that a change in the format of negotiations can be an option.

So far, the six countries — the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia — have held three rounds of talks, but the discussions ended up confirming that the participants’ positions were far apart. Experts have blamed the lack of progress on the ineffective format of negotiations.

“(Concerned countries) have talked a lot about this (changing the negotiation format), and it will be discussed when finalizing the date of the talks,” the senior Foreign Ministry official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity during a background briefing.

Each of the three rounds of talks, which lasted about three days, consisted of several large-scale plenary sessions that brought about 100-200 delegates from the six countries together in a large conference hall.

Earnest negotiations cannot take place in that kind of setting, experts and critics have said, calling for smaller, more effective settings.

Amb. Cho Tae-yong, the South’s No. 2 negotiator for the nuclear talks, is one of the advocates for changing the format. At a U.S. seminar earlier this year, he stressed that an intensive format of negotiations, such as the one used to elect a new pope, is necessary to help the nuclear talks move forward.

North Korea announced the decision to come back to the dialogue table after its chief nuclear negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan, held talks with his U.S. counterpart, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, in Beijing on Saturday.

Hill reiterated during the meeting that the U.S. recognizes North Korea as a sovereign state, has no intention to invade it and will hold bilateral talks with the North within the framework of the six-party talks.

North Korea, which had demanded a U.S. apology for calling it an “outpost of tyranny,” said it took Hill’s remarks as a retraction of that statement.

The shift in the North’s position had been anticipated since mid-June when its paramount leader, Kim Jong-il, told visiting South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young that his country could return to the table as early as July if it gets respect from the U.S. as a dialogue partner.

At that time, Chung said he briefed the North’s leader on an “important proposal” that the South is preparing to formally offer when a fresh round of negotiations take place.

No details of the South Korean proposal have been officially known, but insiders said it is similar to the Marshall Plan that helped lift Europe from the ruins of World War II.

In addition to 200,000 tons of free fertilizer already sent to the North in June, South Korea is in the process of sending 150,000 tons more.

The North’s request for 500,000 tons of rice aid is a key agenda item for inter-Korean economic talks that opened in Seoul on Saturday.

The nuclear row erupted in 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea had admitted to having a secret uranium enrichment program, in addition to its acknowledged plutonium-based one, a claim denied by the North.

The issue gained a new degree of urgency after the North said in February that it had nuclear weapons and was making more. It halted the operation of its key nuclear reactor in April, a move believed to be aimed at collecting more plutonium to make bombs.

North Korea, which fears that it might come under attack by the U.S., is demanding a security guarantee and economic incentives from the U.S. in return for freezing its nuclear weapons program.

But Washington insists that Pyongyang move first to verifiably scrap its nuclear weapons programs before any concessions are granted.