North Korea yesterday signalled it could return to nuclear disarmament talks it had declared dead six months ago, but a report it was near restoring its atomic plant underlined the secretive state would keep the stakes high.
Leader Kim Jong-il told Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on a rare visit to Pyongyang that he first wanted talks with the United States. The North sees such talks as key to ending its status as a global pariah that it argues gives it no choice but to have a nuclear arsenal.
“The hostile relations between the DPRK (North Korea) and the United States should be converted into peaceful ties through the bilateral talks without fail,” the North’s KCNA news agency quoted Mr Kim as saying.
“We expressed our readiness to hold multilateral talks, depending on the outcome of the DPRK-US talks. The six-party talks are also included in the multilateral talks.”
In April, a month before its second nuclear test, North Korea said the six-party talks – between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States – were finished for good. It walked away from those talks last December.
This is the first time it has suggested it might return to what has been the only international forum to try to make the North give up dreams of becoming a nuclear warrior in return for massive aid to fix an economy broken by years of mismanagement.
One analyst said it boiled down to impoverished North Korea hoping to convince Washington to end its economic squeeze and the United States wanting to be certain that Pyongyang will not sell any nuclear weaponry abroad.
“North Korea wants sanctions removed... What the United States wants is some assurance about proliferation because the US doesn’t really care about restoration of an obsolete nuclear plant or how much nuclear material the North has got,” said Cho Min of the Korea Institute of National Unification.
He said the focus was now on whether Washington sends an official, possibly special envoy Stephen Bosworth, to the North.
The US government has said it is open to direct talks with the North to coax it back to nuclear talks.