North Korea said yesterday it won't deal with Japan at revived nuclear disarmament talks next week, criticizing Tokyo's plan to bring up the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents decades ago.
The comment came after South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said that negotiating partners should focus on resolving the international standoff over the North's nuclear program and refrain from adding other issues to the nuclear talks set to resume on Tuesday in Beijing after a 13-month hiatus.
The goal of the negotiations is "denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and dismantling the North's nuclear weapons program," Chung said in an interview in yesterday's Hankyoreh newspaper. "Issues of North Korea's human rights and Japanese abductions ... should not be on the agenda."
Japanese officials have said they want to meet with North Korean delegates to discuss the abductions on the sidelines of the talks, which also include the US, South Korea, China and Russia.
Yesterday, North Korea criticized Japan's intentions.
"The negative role played by Japan at the previous rounds of the talks compels [North Korea] not to deal with Japan even if the talks are resumed," the North's official Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary.
"Japan has so far stood in the way" of the disarmament negotiations, KCNA said. "Japan has busied itself to divert the orientation and atmosphere for the six-party talks into those serving its mean interests."
The official news agency said "Japan will find nothing to do" at the nuclear talks and its participation "would only create more complexities to the talks."
North Korea has admitted kidnapping 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, and allowed five of them to return to Japan, saying the other eight have died. Japan, however, is demanding proof of the deaths and information on other cases of missing Japanese.
China, meanwhile, expressed hope yesterday for progress at the nuclear negotiations.
"I'm pretty sure that all the parties ... will demonstrate good spirit of mutual understanding, mutual respect and work together for the success of the talks," Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing (
The North Korean nuclear crisis began in late 2002, when US officials accused the North of running a secret uranium enrichment program. In February, the North claimed it had nuclear weapons and has since taken steps to harvest more weapons-grade plutonium.
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