Six-way talks may be a stalemate

The US urged North Korea yesterday to make the hard decisions that will lead to the dismantling of its nuclear weapons programs, as Pyongyang agonized over which direction to take.

The Stalinist state is the only country at the talks which also involve China, Japan, South Korea and Russia that has not agreed to a draft statement outlining how it would dump its atomic arsenal and what it would get in return.

It had been expected to deliver its verdict on Wednesday but snubbed a meeting of the chief envoys to the negotiations.

"I think everybody knows the score right now. We are waiting for the North Koreans to give an answer to the Chinese on the draft," the US chief delegate, Christopher Hill, told reporters.

"They have got to make real decisions. We need to have a situation where we know precisely what they have agreed to do, what they have agreed to abandon," he said. "We cannot have a situation where the DRPK pretends to abandon its nuclear programs and we pretend to believe them," he said referring to the North by its official name the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea.

China, the North's closest ally, has been driving the negotiations and was desperately working to salvage something from the discussions, holding talks with all the delegations late into the night Wednesday and again yesterday.

Hill said he had no plans to meet again bilaterally with the North Koreans, with the six-party talks in their 10th day.

"There is no reason to meet them now," said Hill, the assistant secretary of state for Asian and Pacific affairs, who has held eight one-on-one meetings with North Korea's envoy Kim Kye-gwan.

"They know exactly what the situation is. We need clarity from them on these principles. That is so necessary," he said.

The fourth round of talks, which come after a break of more than a year, have been the longest since the process began in 2003. They resumed after Pyongyang raised the stakes in February by declaring it already has nuclear bombs.

All previous rounds ended inconclusively. A collapse of the latest round could prompt Washington to take the issue to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions, a move vigorously opposed by China.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted sources as saying yesterday the main sticking point was how far the North's nuclear dismantlement should go.

It said Pyongyang objected to part of the joint statement that related to "the abandonment of nuclear programs," which was taken to include programs for civilian use.

Instead it wants the wording to be changed to dismantling "nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons-related programs," the agency said.

South Korea's chief delegate Song Min-soon has previously said the framework agreement centered around North Korea ridding itself of nuclear weapons in return for a normalization of ties with the US and Japan.

Japanese and South Korean media reports have added that it also included the provision of a security guarantee and electricity and fuel oil aid to the impoverished North.

But they said it does not include a key North Korean demand that concessions be delivered simultaneously with the dismantling of its atomic weapons program. The US has persistently demanded that the North give up its weapons programs before it gets aid and energy.

In a sign that the talks are nearing an end, Russia's chief delegate Alexandre Alexeyev returned to Beijing yesterday after leaving for Moscow at the weekend to attend to domestic affairs.

The Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying that the talks would last "one or two" more days.

The crisis erupted in October 2002 when the US accused the North of running a secretive uranium enrichment program. Pyongyang has always denied this.