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North comments 'very unhelpful': Christopher Hill

Recent comments by North Korea were “very unhelpful,” US nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill said in Jakarta yesterday after Pyongyang announced it was suspending all dialogue with the South.

“Those comments were in many cases very inappropriate and very unhelpful to the situation. The DPRK [North Korea] needs to be reaching out to its neighbors,” Hill told reporters.

North Korea said on Thursday it was suspending all dialogue with the South and closing the border to Seoul officials, its toughest action in a week of growing cross-border tensions.

Hill said it was not clear how the deteriorating relations between the two neighbors would affect the progress of six-nation disarmament talks, which have reached an impasse over the North’s promised declaration of all its nuclear activities.

“We have not seen how that six-party process is affected by those comments … I have not met with any DPRK representatives since Geneva and so we’ll have to see whether those comments affect it or not,” he said.

“I’m not in a position really to tell you no they don’t, but nor am I in a position to say that they are affecting it,” Hill said.

He said the US was “obviously looking to wrap up the declaration very soon” and that he may hold talks with his North Korean counterpart after a planned visit to East Timor tomorrow.

“If there is a meeting with them [the North Koreans], it will not be before I go to East Timor … maybe after that visit we’ll see what the schedule is,” he said.

Hill said on Wednesday that differences over the North’s promised nuclear declaration have narrowed, but that time was pressing.

In related news, North Korea has asked China to provide massive food aid for its hungry people amid a flare-up in tensions with former major donor, Seoul’s Hankyoreh newspaper said yesterday.

“This means the North won’t look to the South for food aid, at least for a while,” it quoted a diplomatic source as saying. “China has not yet responded to this request.”

A leading analyst also said the North’s leader was likely to turn to his traditional ally.

“Following the April 18-19 US-South Korea summit, Kim Jong-il is likely to visit China to strengthen their traditional alliance as ‘brotherly neighbors’ and request massive food aid,” professor Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies said.

In recent years, the North has received around 400,000 tonnes of rice and about 300,000 tonnes of fertilizer a year from the prosperous South.

Its party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, in an article blasting South Korean President Lee Myung-bak as a traitor and US sycophant, said this week it no longer needed Seoul’s help.

“The DPRK will be able to live as well as it wishes without any help from the South, as it did in the past,” it said.

Seoul officials say the North has made no request for rice or fertilizer this year, despite its severe food shortage. Any such request would be considered depending on the overall situation, said Kim Jung-soo, director general of the Unification Ministry’s humanitarian cooperation bureau.
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