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SINGAPORE: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will gauge North Korea's latest nuclear disarmament efforts when she meets its top diplomat for the first time at six-party talks here, a US envoy said on Tuesday.
But the envoy, Christopher Hill, reinforced Rice's own modest expectations for Wednesday's high-level meeting in Singapore when he told reporters it was "far too early" to say whether it would be a turning point.
Rice meets North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun and their counterparts from China, Russia, South Korea and Japan on the eve of a regional security forum to discuss how to verify Pyongyang's steps on nuclear disarmament.
"It will give some indications of the amount of effort the North Koreans have put in to completing this verification protocol," Hill told reporters who accompanied Rice to Singapore from Washington.
The protocol - which aims to establish arrangements to verify North Korea's steps toward nuclear disarmament - was submitted to North Korea and the other parties earlier this month in Beijing.
Before the North Koreans took home the four-page draft to study, "they made some preliminary comments, indicated some problems with it," Hill said without elaborating.
The United States hopes the protocol will be finalised in early August, or 45 days since North Korea submitted its partial accounting of its atomic programmes at the end of June in Beijing, which chairs the six-party process.
The so-called declaration that was submitted broke a months-long deadlock in the talks with North Korea, which tested a nuclear device in 2006 before agreeing shortly afterward to return to denuclearisation negotiations.
Rice said after leaving Washington on Sunday that the meeting here would not be "historic, monumental or even consequential" and would fall into the "consultation category" with North Korea and their partners.
She expected the meeting to send a "very strong message" to North Korea to live up to its disarmament obligations.
Striking a more upbeat tone than his US counterpart, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said: "I think this will be very significant for advancing the spirit of the six-party talks."
Hill already met here on Tuesday with his counterparts from South Korea, Russia and Japan to discuss the draft protocol which he said "envisions a verification based on the six parties and a role for the IAEA."
Hill also told reporters he would travel to Vienna for general talks on the North Korean denuclearisation process Friday at the International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters.
South Korea's chief envoy on North Korea, Kim Sook, confirmed Wednesday's meeting would focus on the "very important issue" of establishing measures to verify progress towards denuclearisation.
"The ball is actually in the North Korean court because they have already received the draft of the verification protocol," he said.
Japanese officials said Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura hoped China would "show leadership" during the six-way talks.
"As yet there is no prospects for the beginning of the verification," they quoted him as telling his Chinese counterpart Yang in a bilateral meeting.
Underlining the divisions, the White House said on Monday that North Korea and Iran remain in what US President George W. Bush dubbed an "axis of evil" with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
"I think that until they give up their nuclear weapons programmes completely and verifiably, I think that we keep them in the same category," said spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Under the third and final phase of a disarmament accord to the six-party forum, North Korea must permanently dismantle its atomic plants and hand over all nuclear material and weaponry.
In return, it would receive wide-ranging energy aid. - AFP/de
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