Shuttle diplomacy to end the North Korean nuclear standoff picked up pace yesterday amid reports that six-nation talks on easing tensions will likely be held next month.
An EU delegation arrived in South Korea after three days of meetings with officials in the communist North. They were expected to bring word about the isolated country's thoughts on a possible new round of multilateral talks to end the nuclear crisis.
For weeks, the US, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas have tried to convene a new round before the year's end. But differences between the US and the North make that unlikely, news reports in Seoul said yesterday.
"We have not completely ruled out the possibility of holding the talks this month but it gets increasingly likely that it would be sometime in mid-January," the national Yonhap news agency quoted a government source as saying.
Meanwhile, South Korea's Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck left yesterday for Beijing to sound out China for insights on North Korea's position and the feasibility of arranging talks by the new year.
The picture was expected to sharpen after South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan's meeting with the EU delegation scheduled for later yesterday.
At the border truce village of Panmunjom in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone separating the North and South, the EU team stepped over a concrete curb signifying the border and was greeted by officials from the US-led UN Command and the EU.
North Korea rarely allows Western diplomats to cross the border. The last Western government official to cross was Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, who visited both Koreas in May.
Such crossings are indicative of North Korea's willingness to promote political reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula.
Guido Martini of Italy, who led the nine-member EU delegation, didn't provide details of the talks in North Korea, simply saying that the trip "was very good for all of us."
Asked whether there was any word from the North on whether it would join six-nation nuclear talks, he said, "this is our wish."
The North Korean nuclear crisis flared in October last year, when US officials said the communist state had admitted to running a new nuclear weapons program using enriched uranium in violation of international agreements.
North Korea said it restarted its nuclear facilities after it kicked out UN nuclear inspectors and quit the nuclear nonproliferation treaty in January. It also says it has completed reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods in a process that could yield enough plutonium for several bombs.
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