North Korea said yesterday that it would work with the US to resolve unspecified differences remaining after rare high-level talks with US President Barack Obama’s envoy aimed at restarting international nuclear negotiations.
It was the North’s first reaction to three days of talks with special envoy Stephen Bosworth, who arrived in Beijing yesterday to brief Chinese officials.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said it understands the need to resume the six-nation nuclear talks that Pyongyang walked away from earlier this year before conducting its second-ever nuclear test.
Bosworth said after leaving North Korea on Thursday that the two sides reached a “common understanding” on the need to restart the nuclear negotiations.
In Beijing, Bosworth was to meet Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) and Beijing’s nuclear envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei (武大偉), a ministry spokeswoman said.
Though North Korea stopped short of making a firm commitment to return to the negotiating table, its reaction was positive and raised hopes that the stalled disarmament process could resume.
Its Foreign Ministry said the meetings with the US “deepened the mutual understanding, narrowed their differences and found not a few common points.”
The two sides “also reached a series of common understandings of the need to resume the six-party talks and the importance of implementing” a 2005 disarmament pact, it said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
“Both sides agreed to continue to cooperate with each other in the future to narrow down the remaining differences,” it said, without elaborating on the remaining differences.
The 2005 pact calls for North Korea to end its nuclear programs in exchange for economic aid, security assurances and diplomatic recognition.
In Washington, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said for a “preliminary meeting, it was quite positive.”
Bosworth’s trip marked the Obama administration’s first high-level talks with North Korea.
He met with First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju, leader Kim Jong-il’s top foreign policy brain, as well as North Korea’s chief nuclear envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan. The visit did not include a meeting with Kim Jong-il.
North Korea said the two sides “had a long exhaustive and candid discussion on wide-ranging issues” including denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, forging a peace treaty, improving bilateral relations and economic and energy assistance.
Analysts said it was too early to call Bosworth’s mission a success. Lee Sang-hyun of the Sejong Institute, a private security think tank outside Seoul, predicted a “tug of war” over when North Korea should rejoin the talks.
Meanwhile, the Tokyo-based Choson Sinbo, considered a mouthpiece for Pyongyang, reported yesterday that the North would not rejoin any multilateral nuclear talks without assurances of an end to “hostile relations between North Korea and the US.”
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