The US and North Korea will meet in Beijng next week to finalize arrangements for the first US government food aid shipment to the impoverished country in three years, the US Department of State said on Friday.
However, in a reminder of tensions on the Korean Peninsula, Washington criticized a threat by the North’s military to wage a “sacred war” against South Korea in response to current US-South Korea military exercises.
In a diplomatic breakthrough, Washington and Pyongyang announced the US aid on Wednesday. In exchange, North Korea has agreed to freeze nuclear activities and allow the return of UN nuclear inspectors.
The department said the US special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, Robert King, and senior US Agency for International Development official Jon Brause would hold technical discussions with North Korean officials in the Chinese capital, starting on Wednesday.
“The idea is to finalize all of the technical arrangements so that the nutritional assistance can begin to move,” US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.
The US says it has offered 217,724 tonnes of food, to be delivered in monthly shipments and targeted at young children and pregnant women. The last handouts ended abruptly in 2009 when North Korea expelled US food monitors.
North Korea, which suffers chronic food shortages and endured a famine in the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands of people, requested the assistance more than a year ago.
Nuland described as “unfortunate” the statement by the Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army threatening South Korea with war.
The statement was provided on Friday in Pyongyang.
“Frankly, it is not helpful to the kind of environment that we are trying to foster. We had a good, small initial step, so we would like to see that matched with other steps as we move forward,” Nuland said.
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