SEOUL, Jan 19: North Korea on Sunday rejected international diplomatic efforts to harness its nuclear programme, insisting it would negotiate only with the United States, a position Washington warned would further isolate the impoverished state.

The Stalinist state said it would not allow the United States to “internationalise” the dispute, and specifically said the United Nations should not be involved in trying to resolve the crisis.

“The DPRK (North Korea) and the US should sit face-to-face to solve the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted first vice foreign minister Kang Sok-Ju as saying in Pyongyang.

“The internationalisation of this issue would make the prospect of its settlement more complicated and gloomy.”

Washington demurred, sending national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to advertise continued US efforts to work with regional allies to defuse the crisis.

“North Korea may escalate and may continue to escalate but they are doing so at the cost of their own isolation,” Rice said.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in the strongest words from Washington since the crisis began in October, warned the United States would not back down from confrontation with the reclusive regime.

“All options are still on the table with North Korea,” Rumsfeld told a television talk show from Washington, while repeating President George W. Bush’s assurances that Washington has no plans to invade.

“But does that mean the United States or South Korea would, would take an attack from North Korea and not respond? Of course not.”

The rhetoric flew just one day before the UN Security Council was due to discuss the issue in New York and a day after UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special envoy, Maurice Strong, ended a four-day visit to Pyongyang.

In a rare public comment carried by KCNA on Sunday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il warned international pressure would not break his resolve.

“The further the imperialists intensify their moves to isolate and stifle the DPRK, the more dynamically its army and people turn out to successfully build a powerful nation,” Kim said, the news agency reported.

“No force on earth can break the inexhaustible strength and indomitable will of this great army and people who have brought about only victories pulling through all difficulties and ordeals.”

Urging “quiet diplomacy,” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukova, was in Pyongyang, delivering a package of proposals from Moscow.

Losyukova met with two of North Korea’s political heavyweights, Workers’ Party central committee secretary Choe Thae-Bok and cabinet vice premier Jo Chang-Dok, and offered them Moscow’s proposals to defuse the nuclear crisis, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported.

Although no details were released by KCNA, Russia has made public its desire for a deal that would see North Korea receive security guarantees and economic aid in return for a commitment to freeze its nuclear programme.

“Pyongyang’s response will be clear tomorrow,” Losyukova said, as quoted by the Russian news agency after his talks.

Meanwhile US envoys, including top diplomat for Asia James Kelly, met with regional allies to find help to pressure the North.

Kelly, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, met Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi to forge a united stance.

Kawaguchi and Kelly said Japan, the United States, China, South Korea and Russia would continue working together in a bid to resolve the crisis, a foreign ministry official said.

US ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard told a KBS television talk show here that the United States would consider “a broad approach” to North Korea to entail economic cooperation beyond food aid if it first abandoned its nuclear programme.

He also reiterated the United States was not considering economic sanctions at present, but the North must understand its continued defiance of international demands would entail consequences.

The international alert over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions was raised by Kelly on a visit last October to Pyongyang when he said the hermit state’s rulers had admitted to secretly restarting its atomic programme.

Despite North Korean denials, the revelation kickstarted a chain of events that led to Pyongyang kicking out UN weapons inspectors and threatening to reactivate nuclear facilities, supposedly for energy production.

The North’s actions were in breach of a 1994 agreement with Washington that froze its nuclear programme in return for fuel aid and help in building a nuclear reactor to produce energy.—AFP