North Korea condemned US President George W. Bush yesterday for meeting a prominent defector who suffered a decade of abuses in a prison camp, saying the move chilled the atmosphere for the communist nation to return to nuclear disarmament talks.
Meanwhile, a high-ranking North Korean delegation in Seoul held a rare meeting yesterday with South Korea's president as the two sides held high-level talks to arrange family reunions and military contacts across their Cold War border at bilateral talks running alongside efforts to coax the North back to nuclear negotiations.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun urged the communist state to seek a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue soon at a meeting with North Korean chief Cabinet counselor Kwon Ho-ung, Roh's spokesman Kim Man-soo said.
The two Koreas scheduled a closing session for their talks yesterday evening but it was later delayed, indicating there was still more negotiating to be done on an agreement.
Bush met last week at the White House with Kang Chol-hwan, a defector now working as a journalist in South Korea and author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang, detailing his life in a North Korean prison where he was incarcerated as a child with his family.
Referring to Kang as "human trash," the North's official Korean Central News Agency said Washington's calls for improved human rights in the communist nation show it "has yet to come up with a firm position that it would recognize and respect [the North] as a negotiating partner."
"It cannot be interpreted as anything other than a move pouring cold water" on efforts to resume the nuclear talks, KCNA wrote in a commentary.
Just last week, the North's reclusive leader Kim Jong-il held a surprise meeting with a visiting South Korean envoy that raised hopes of the country's return to the talks it has boycotted for a year -- saying it could resume negotiations if it gets appropriate respect from Washington. Roh noted yesterday that Kim had also said the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was the dying wish of his father, North Korea's founding ruler Kim Il-sung.
It has been a year since the last round of nuclear talks convened June 23 last year, with the North refusing to return citing "hostile" US policies. The US government said Wednesday it would provide 50,000 tonnes of food to North Korea in a humanitarian decision unrelated to efforts to convince the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
At this week's talks between the Koreas, South Korea has proposed the sides resume military talks next month. It also requested that family reunions at the North's Diamond Mountain resort restart in August, and that relatives unable to make the trip be allowed to see each other via the Internet.
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