Rice presses North Korea on nukes, Japan on beef ban

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged North Korea yesterday to return to talks on scrapping its nuclear arms programmes and said Washington's Asian allies could do more to persuade Pyongyang.

She also called on China's leaders to pursue greater democracy and pressed Japan to end its ban on imports of US beef, but did not manage to get Tokyo to specify a timetable for reopening the lucrative Japanese beef market.

"Let me put it plainly: North Korea should return to the six-party talks immediately, if it is serious about exploring the path forward that we and the other parties have proposed," Rice, a former academic, said in a policy speech in Tokyo.

Rice later arrived in South Korea, where she was meeting with some of the more than 30,000 US troops based on the peninsula, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in an armed truce leaving the belligerents technically still at war.

She meets with South Korean officials today.

US and South Korean soldiers yesterday began annual war games that Pyongyang called "nuclear war exercises", saying its buildup of nuclear arms was necessary as self defence. North Korea also attacked Rice this week for labelling it "an outpost of tyranny" and said it would not deal with her.

At an underground bunker used as the command operations headquarters for the joint exercises, Rice rallied more than 100 US and South Korean troops, who she said were "on the frontlines of freedom".

She praised the forces at Command Post Tango, dug into the side of a mountain south of Seoul, for facing the "threat across the divide of a state that is not democratic, that is not free and that does not have the best interests of its people at heart," referring to North Korea.

Rice chose her language more carefully in Tokyo and refrained from repeating the label that she used earlier this year to describe the secretive state.

Rice reiterated that the United States had "no intention of attacking or invading North Korea" and said Washington was prepared, with others in the six-way process, to offer "multilateral security assurances to North Korea in the context of ending its nuclear programme."

She also urged Asian partners in the talks - Japan, South Korea and North Korea's biggest benefactor, China - to work harder to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiations stalled since June.

"We especially urge China to do so and I will do that when I go to Beijing," Rice said later after meeting Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura.

While Washington wants its Asian partners to exert more pressure on North Korea, they, in turn, have called on the United States to show greater "flexibility" to revive the talks, which also involve Russia.

Rice is on her first trip to Asia as secretary of state and has visited India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

US officials said Rice's speech yesterday was not an ultimatum to North Korea, but declined to say how the United States would respond if Pyongyang still refused to resume the negotiations.

Washington believes North Korea is using Rice's rhetoric as an excuse to shun the talks so it can avoid deciding whether to scrap its programmes in exchange for security guarantees and economic aid, the officials said.

Rice said the United States and its allies would not be silent about the plight of the North Korean people, the nature of Pyongyang's regime and its abduction of "innocent civilians of peaceful neighbouring countries", a reference to Pyongyang's kidnapping of Japanese and South Korean citizens decades ago.

Despite the US need for China's support on North Korea, Rice prodded Beijing to develop a more open society in remarks likely to irk a Chinese leadership sensitive to what it sees as foreign meddling in its domestic affairs.

"Openness is the vanguard of success," she said. "Even China must eventually embrace some form of open, genuinely representative government if it is to reap the benefits and meet the challenges of a globalising world."

Rice held up the Japanese-US relationship as exemplary and backed Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, but also complained over beef imports.

"The time has come to solve this problem," she said, adding that American beef was safe.

Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, however, said after talks with Rice that Tokyo would not be rushed.

In late 2003, after the United States reported its first case of mad cow disease, Tokyo imposed a ban on imports of US beef worth more than $1 billion a year.

Japan agreed in October to allow shipments of beef from young US cattle but Washington has become increasingly frustrated because Tokyo has not worked through the technical details necessary to implement the accord.