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WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will meet her North Korean counterpart for the first time on the sidelines of next week's ASEAN Regional Forum, a State Department spokesman said on Friday.
Rice is expected to meet North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun in an informal meeting of the top diplomats of the six countries negotiating Pyongyang's denuclearization program, spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Rice had no plans for a bilateral meeting with Pak, but will see him in the meeting with her counterparts from South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, the other four states involved in the six-party talks, McCormack said.
"It's really a meeting to review where the six-party process is at the moment," the spokesman added.
"All the ministers are going to be in Singapore. Why not have an informal gathering?" he said, playing down expectations of any substantial outcome from the meeting.
The 27-member ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which includes nations from Asia as well as the European Union and the United States, meets in Singapore on July 24 at the end of a meeting of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
McCormack said the six-way meeting on the ARF sidelines was not aimed at generating "some specific negotiated outcome".
"It is a good opportunity for the ministers to be able to assess the work of their heads of delegations to the six-party talks."
South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that the meeting, the highest-level gathering since six-party talks began in 2003, would be held next Wednesday.
At the latest meeting of the group's negotiators in Beijing last week, Pyongyang, which tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006, agreed to completely disable its main nuclear facilities by the end of October and to allow thorough site inspections to verify that all necessary steps had been taken.
Those steps are part of the second phase of the landmark agreement reached in February 2007 in which Pyongyang agreed to shut down and give a full accounting of all of its nuclear programs in return for aid, including large volumes of heavy fuel oil.
The parties have now agreed to a verification mechanism that would include experts from the six nations visiting facilities, reviewing documents and interviewing technical personnel.
The third and final phase of the disarmament deal calls for the North to permanently dismantle its atomic plants and hand over all nuclear material and weaponry.
"The process is moving in the right direction based on action for action," McCormack said of North Korea's progress.
At the Singapore meeting, he said, "Our message will be, let's move this process forward."
- AFP/so
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