|
SINGAPORE - The months-long impasse over North Korea's nuclear disarmament must come to an end, a top US negotiator said in Singapore Monday on the eve of key talks with his counterpart from the communist nation.
"We can't afford any further delays here," Christopher Hill told reporters ahead of negotiations Tuesday in Singapore with North Korea's Kim Kye-Gwan.
"We do need to make some progress very soon."
Washington has been pushing North Korea to come clean on its entire nuclear programme as a key step in a 2007 six-nation denuclearisation deal that also involves China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
The US State Department has played down the possibility of a breakthrough at the Singapore talks.
But South Korean media reports have suggested Kim could be prepared to hand over a document that addresses concerns about its alleged secret uranium enrichment programme and cooperation with Syria.
Hill, who arrived in the city-state from Indonesia where he had attended a conference, last met Kim in Geneva in mid-March.
The 2007 six-party deal grants North Korea -- which tested an atomic weapon in 2006 -- energy aid and major diplomatic and security benefits in return for full denuclearisation.
The current phase of the deal required the North to disable its main plutonium-producing plants and declare all nuclear activities by the end of last year.
The North says it submitted the declaration in November. But the United States says it has not accounted for an alleged secret uranium enrichment programme or for alleged proliferation to Syria.
"What we need to do is to try to resolve the issue of the DPRK's responsibility to provide a complete and correct declaration... 'complete and correct' means just that," Hill said.
He said the aim was to hold another six-party meeting "very soon".
South Korea's Hankyoreh daily, which reported that a breakthrough could be in the offing, said the US had vowed not to make public the so-called "confidential minute" and not to exploit it for political purposes.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted a South Korean foreign ministry official as saying there were expectations that Kim would "bring an answer acceptable to the US" with him to Singapore.
Asked if anything new would be brought up at the talks, Hill said: "I don't want to describe who's got something new."
The talks coincide with increasing tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang.
Conservative Lee Myung-Bak, who took office as South Korea's new president in February, has angered the North by adopting a tougher line on ties.
North Korea kept up the rhetoric on Monday, accusing Lee of pushing the peninsula closer to nuclear war and telling Seoul it should order the United States to withdraw its "nuclear weapons massively stockpiled in South Korea."
The US, Seoul's long-time military ally, says it withdrew the last of its atomic weapons from the peninsula in 1991.
On Thursday, North Korea announced it was suspending all dialogue with the South and closing the border to Seoul officials.
Kim made no comment to reporters after he emerged from the North Korean ambassador's house late Monday.
Singapore and North Korea have had diplomatic relations since 1975. Hill said talks are occurring in Singapore because of "logistics, and it's worked very well for us."
From Singapore, Hill was to travel on Wednesday to Beijing, where he said he would meet South Korean, Japanese, and probably Russian officials as well as the Chinese.
"We will have to see where we are by the end of this week and see whether we can get moving on the six-party meeting," Hill said. - AFP/ir
|
|
|
