South Korea's key envoy on North Korea urged the US yesterday to take a softer stance toward the communist country amid signs that a new round of nuclear crisis talks could be delayed.
"North Korea should stop pressing its demands too hard. The United States is also required to ease its stance for the momentum of dialogue," Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun said.
His comment comes as top diplomats from South Korea, Japan and the US gather in Washington to fine-tune preparations for a second round of six-nation talks originally expected to take place this month.
US officials warned on Tuesday that North Korea may be stalling over key conditions for resolving the nuclear crisis and talks could be pushed back until early next year.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, however, played down the idea that the talks had hit a roadblock.
There is "no deadlock in the talks. The talks will take place," Powell said on Wednesday during a visit to Morocco.
"They haven't been postponed because they haven't been scheduled to begin with," he said.
Jeong also said "progress can be made" at talks this week between Mitoji Yabunaka, director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceania Affairs Bureau, South Korea's Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck and James Kelly, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
"China and South Korea are trying hard to mediate between the United States and North Korea. So you don't have to think that the talks will not take place this month."
"Things could improve," the minister said, referring to Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's (
A senior State Department official said Washington was "ready to go" but conceded there were "competing ideas" about how the talks should work.
According to news reports in Seoul and Tokyo, the US rejected a Chinese-backed draft of a proposed joint statement for the new round of talks.
The draft statement envisaged a security guarantee for Pyongyang in return for its declaration that the Stalinist country would scrap its nuclear program and return to an international nuclear safeguard accord, Yonhap news agency here said.
The US says no such guarantee would be forthcoming until North Korea verifiably dismantles its nuclear program, Japan's Kyodo news agency said.
North Korea's nuclear activities have been shut off from the outside world since the country pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and kicked out international monitors in January this year.
The North recently turned down Washington's longstanding demand that it scrap its nuclear weapons verifiably and irreversibly as an initial step to dialogue.
Pyongyang says it cannot give up its nuclear weapons without a security assurance, claiming Washington plans to invade the country.
US, South Korean and Japanese diplomats have been working for weeks on the wording of a statement promising a security assurance at the proposed next round of six-party talks.
The crisis erupted after Washington said in October last year that North Korea had broken a 1994 nuclear freeze agreement by embarking on an enriched-uranium program.
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