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WASHINGTON : Six-nation negotiations for North Korea's nuclear disarmament are still on track for Beijing next week even though China has yet to announce the event, the US State Department said Friday.
A US official said meanwhile on condition of anonymity that US-North Korean talks in Singapore offered no guarantee the meeting in Beijing would succeed but also gave no sign the process would "fall apart" either.
State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood told reporters "it's scheduled to happen" when asked if the talks involving the two Koreas, United States, China, Japan and Russia might not take place as scheduled on Monday.
"I have heard nothing about any possibility of it not taking place," Wood said. "The negotiations will take place in Beijing."
US envoy Christopher Hill and North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-Gwan ended two days of talks Friday in Singapore aimed at clarifying steps they agreed in October to ensure that North Korea is telling the truth about its disarmament.
The pair indicated Friday there were still difficulties over the issue of removing samples from nuclear sites.
Washington expects the pair, plus their counterparts from the four other countries in the negotiations, to meet Monday in Beijing to seal a written agreement enshrining the verification measures.
A US State Department official who asked not to be named said it was not clear why China, host of the six-party negotiations, had not yet announced the meeting in Beijing.
"Why? I don't know," the official said.
The official said that Hill was still confident of obtaining the written verification protocol despite the difficulties in the negotiations.
"It's going to be hard for Chris himself to be able to give you a good sense right now of whether we're going to be able to accomplish all of our objectives by the end of Beijing," the official said.
"But certainly Chris is very hopeful that we can do this," the official added.
"It's hard to be confident with the North Koreans any time you are having negotiations but I think we're certainly hopeful and I haven't received hints so far that ... this is likely to fall apart," the official said.
In October, after reaching an apparent agreement on verification procedures, the US announced it would drop the communist North from a terrorism blacklist, and the North reversed plans to restart its plutonium-producing nuclear plants.
However, North Korea, which tested an atomic weapon in October 2006, insists it never agreed to samples of atomic material being taken away. Washington says it did.
- AFP /ls
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