North Korea links talks to money

Beijing - After walking away from the negotiating table nearly a year ago, North Korea has agreed to return to six-party talks on its nuclear weapons program.

Those talks, which the North is linking to resolution of the U.S. financial sanctions on it, could resume before the end of the year.

A spokesman for North Korea's foreign ministry, quoted by the state-run KCNA news agency, said Wednesday in a written statement that North Korea's move represented "a self-defensive counter-measure against the U.S. daily increasing nuclear threat and financial sanctions against it."

He noted that the discussions about resuming negotiations sometimes included direct talks between the United States and North Korea.

North Korea has long pushed for discussions about its nuclear program to be between only itself and the United States, a request the Bush administration has declined.

The statement said North Korea -- also called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- "decided to return to the six-party talks on the premise that the issue of lifting financial sanctions will be discussed and settled between the DPRK and the U.S. within the framework of the six-party talks."

The agreement was reached during seven hours of talks in Beijing Tuesday among North Korea, China and the United States, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said.

Hill, who is chief U.S. envoy to North Korea, described Tuesday's trilateral meeting as "very positive" and said he expects the six-party negotiations to resume in November or December, at the latest.

Speaking in Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush said he was "very pleased" with the decision, but cautioned that there is still "a lot of work to do" to get North Korea to dismantle its weapons program.

In Beijing, Hill stressed there is still a long way to go before the talks begin, and North Korea is notorious for changing its tone quickly. "I have not broken out the cigars and champagne yet, believe me," he said.

Hill expressed confidence that the North Koreans would not carry out another another nuclear test in coming days. "I think that it is pretty clear that to carry out another nuclear test would be totally, totally not in the spirit of what we discussed yesterday," he told CNN. "We didn't explicitly address that, but that certainly implicitly is there."

Hill said North Korea has plenty of incentive to give up its nuclear ambitions. "Nobody is going to accept that North Korea becomes a nuclear nation," he said.

The other parties who did not participate in Tuesday's meeting in Beijing -- South Korea, Russia and Japan -- welcomed the development.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told CNN that Pyongyang may have decided to return to the negotiating table because of international pressure following its underground nuclear test earlier this month.

"North Korea was faced with a unified voice of the international community that there was a cost to their behavior," he said.

The nuclear controversy began in 1993, when North Korea announced it was quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which binds signatories to renouncing procurement of nuclear weapons.

But a year later, North Korea and the United States signed an agreement in which Pyongyang pledged to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for international aid to build two power-producing nuclear reactors.

In 2000, frustrated by delays in building the plants, North Korea threatened to restart its nuclear program if Washington did not provide compensation for the loss of electricity caused by delays.

In February 2003, North Korea said it was restarting its nuclear facilities, and in August of that year, the United States, North Korea, China, South Korea, Russia and Japan held the first round of the six-party talks to try to resolve the issue.

The coming round would be the sixth of those talks, and the first since November 2005, when Pyongyang quit the fifth round after Washington placed financial restrictions against banks and North Korean companies for their alleged involvement in currency counterfeiting and other illicit activities.

Since that time, North Korea has test-fired missiles that could reach Japan and possibly the United States and conducted an underground nuclear test on October 9.

The nuclear test brought a swift response from the United Nations Security Council, which imposed sanctions on North Korea that even long-time ally China supported.

Beijing was embarrassed after Pyongyang went ahead with the test despite Chinese requests that it not do so.

Analysts suggested both Washington and Pyongyang had something to gain from an agreement at this time. "The agreement to resume six-party talks was reached because the Bush administration wants to score a diplomatic point ahead of the midterm elections in the United States and North Korea does not want to see China losing face," Yasuhiko Yoshida of the Osaka University of Economics and Law told Reuters.

"The interests of the two sides matched this time. At least it shows that North Korea will not conduct a second nuclear test before the resumption of the six-party talks," Yoshida said.

"I don't think the chaos stemming from North Korea's nuclear test has been fundamentally erased," Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at People's University in Beijing, told Reuters. "I think the potential for disputes between China and the United States and Japan will only escalate since North Korea has increased the flexibility of its policies."

Japan's foreign ministry Tuesday said Tokyo was notified of the agreement reached in Beijing and remains committed to the multilateral negotiations.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev told Russia's Itar-Tass news agency the news is a "very positive development" and hoped talks would begin "in the near future."

South Korea's Foreign Ministry issued a similar statement, adding that Seoul "will continue to focus its diplomatic efforts on achieving peace and security on the Korean peninsula."

Chinese officials approached U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week, and asked if Hill would participate in the three-way meeting, Hill said.

McCormack said the sanctions placed on North Korea after the nuclear test will remain in place.

Bush said Washington will send teams to the region to enforce the current U.N. resolution as well as make sure the upcoming talks are "effective." (Full story)

Bush said U.S. resolve that North Korea not possess nuclear weapons remains strong, saying result of the talks must be "that we achieve the results we want, which is a North Korea that abandons her nuclear weapons programs and her nuclear weapons in a verifiable fashion in return for a better way forward for her people." -- CNN News

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