The top UN political official will travel to North Korea this month for wide-ranging talks with the reclusive communist state locked in a nuclear dispute with the West, the UN announced on Sunday.
In a statement, the UN said that Lynn Pascoe, under-secretary-general for political affairs, would visit North Korea between Feb. 9 and Feb. 12 to discuss “all issues of mutual interest and concern in a comprehensive manner.”
Pascoe, who will travel as special envoy of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is a former US ambassador to Indonesia and the most senior UN official in six years to visit North Korea.
Also in Pascoe’s party of four will be Ban’s deputy chief of staff, Kim Won-soo, who like his boss is South Korean, UN officials said. The group will also visit China, Japan and South Korea, the UN statement said.
Those three countries, along with the US, Russia and North Korea itself, form a six-party group that discusses ending Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program in return for aid to the impoverished state. The UN is not involved in the talks, but supports them.
Pyongyang has boycotted the talks for the past year, and as a price for returning to the table, has demanded talks with the US to reach a peace treaty to replace the armistice that halted hostilities in the 1950-1953 Korean War. Washington says a treaty is only possible when the North ends its atomic ambitions.
US-led UN forces signed the armistice at the end of the Korean War with North Korea and China. A peace treaty would allow North Korea to tap international financial institutions for aid.
Fresh UN sanctions last year aimed to punish North Korea for a nuclear test in May, its second atomic detonation. The expanded measures are intended to cut off its arms sales, a vital export estimated to earn the destitute state more than US$1 billion a year.
The UN sanctions and the cutoff of handouts from South Korea have dealt a blow to the North, which has an estimated GDP of US$17 billion and suffers from chronic food shortages.
Last week, North Korea opened up sporadic artillery exchanges with the South over a disputed sea border. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said the North might be firing to press its demands for talks on a peace deal with the South.
Ban has repeatedly said he would be willing to visit North Korea if invited. It was not immediately clear whether Pascoe’s trip could lead to an eventual visit by Ban. Both Ban and Pascoe were visiting Cyprus on Sunday.
UN officials dismissed ideas that Pascoe would be acting as a proxy for the US.
“They [the UN] have been trying for a long time” to visit North Korea, said one official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the visit. “It’s taken a while for it to come together.”
The UN statement said Pascoe would meet UN officials who work in North Korea on aid and development programs and visit UN project sites. As of last October, there were about 40 international staff there, mostly from the World Food Programme and UNICEF.
Among other things, Pascoe would be “trying to ensure that the people on the ground can do the work they need to do,” an official said.
The last high-ranking UN official to visit North Korea was Canadian Maurice Strong in 2004. Strong was at the time special envoy on North Korea for then-UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.
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