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Rice, South Koreans pleased with North Korean progress

North Korea is cooperating well with US experts in disabling its nuclear program, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her South Korean counterpart said on Wednesday.

"So far, so good, I would say," Rice told reporters, flanked by South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon.

"The reports from the experts in the field is that the cooperation is going well," she said in her first remarks on the subject since the operation began on Monday at the Yongbyon complex.

Song added that the disablement process "was going in the right direction" but stressed the importance of moving from the disablement phase to dismantlement.

`COOPERATIVE'

US State Department official Sung Kim, who heads the nine-strong team overseeing the operation, on Tuesday described the North as having been "very cooperative."

He added: "I think we are off to a good start. I hope to achieve all the disablement, at least this phase of disablement, by December 31."

The North's action to roll back its atomic program, after half a century of research and development, follows a February six-nation accord under which it will receive major aid and diplomatic benefits for full denuclearization.

YONGBYON

A disablement priority is the reactor at Yongbyon, the source of the plutonium used in the communist state's nuclear test in october last year. Kim said there had also been some work at the other two main facilities, a reprocessing plant and a fuel fabrication plant.

The North shut down the reactor in July. Disablement, scheduled for completion by year-end, aims to make it and other facilities unusable for at least a year while talks on total denuclearization continue.

Pyongyang will receive energy aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars in return for disablement and a full declaration of all its nuclear programs, including a suspected highly enriched uranium project.

If the North goes on next year to dismantle the plants and give up its plutonium stockpile and nuclear weapons, it can expect normalized relations with Washington and a peace pact to replace the 1950-1953 Korean War armistice.

A US envoy also urged South Korea to take into account human rights abuses in North Korea in its diplomacy with the communist neighbor as Pyongyang disables its nuclear arsenal, according to the transcript of a speech released in Washington on Wednesday.

Seoul, which pursues a "sunshine policy" of engagement with Pyongyang, for the first time last year voted for a UN resolution condemning the North's rights abuses, a move which angered the communist regime.

"This was a key development, and we hope South Korea will continue to take into account issues of human rights and governance when formulating policy toward its neighbor," deputy US special envoy for human rights in North Korea Christian Whiton said.

CONCERN

Last year's UN resolution, which passed 91-21 with 60 abstentions, expressed serious concern at reports of "torture, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention, the absence of due process and the rule of law, the imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor" in North Korea.

Pyongyang called South Korea's support for the resolution "treacherous" and warned that ties could be strained.

"With North Korea, there is so much attention paid to the nuclear issue that often human rights gets only a passing mention," Whiton said in remarks at the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels on Tuesday.
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