Senior diplomats from the US and North Korea are scheduled to attend a security conference in Beijing next week, but the US Department of State on Friday said there is no plan for direct talks between them.
The annual Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue is an informal meeting that brings together government officials and academics of the six nations that were involved in long-stalled talks on North Korea’s nuclear program.
Among those attending are to be US Special Representative for North Korea Policy Sung Kim. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that North Korea would also send a representative.
The occasion is to offer an opportunity for a rare meeting between the adversaries, amid heightened tensions following a North Korean nuclear test and rocket launch that drew stiff sanctions.
NO MEETING
However, US Department of State spokesman Ory Abramowicz said no meeting is planned.
The department said in a statement that Kim would travel to Beijing from Tuesday to Thursday for meetings with Chinese officials and to attend the dialogue.
Susan Shirk, a professor at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, which organizes the closed-door conference, on Thursday said by e-mail that she was unable to give any information about it.
The university’s Web site described it as a “multilateral forum that involves high-level policymakers, defense ministry officials, military officers and researchers from China, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia and the United States.”
It described the dialogue as a “regular channel of informal communication among the six governments.”
It said officials participate in the meetings in their private capacity, not as official government representatives.
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