February 11, 2007	Sunday	Muharram 22, 1428

BEIJING: North Korea is a totalitarian state where the government doesn’t tolerate any public deviation from the official line. Simply mishandling a portrait of leader Kim Jong II is considered a crime.

However, that doesn’t mean there is no political debate inside one of the world’s most tightly controlled nations.

As negotiators in Beijing try to persuade the North to take its first steps toward dismantling its nuclear programme, the main US envoy alluded to the different factions in the communist nation grappling with the question of whether Pyongyang will give up its most potent weapons without sacrificing the regime’s security.

“Some people in the (North) ... understand that these weapons have done more to isolate and endanger and impoverish the DPRK than they will ever do to protect” it, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said on Friday, referring to the country by the initials for its official name. “Alas, I don’t think this is a universal view in the DPRK.”

Hill said there was another group that believes nuclear weapons “can create prestige.”

He didn’t name names, but analysts widely believe there are divisions in the North between the military and diplomats — a tug-of-war that creates a schizophrenic appearance from the outside given the lack of information about internal policy struggles in Pyongyang, where there is no freedom of the press.

North Korea and the United States have apparently set aside that financial dispute in the latest talks, with Hill saying on Friday it wasn’t among the remaining obstacles to a new agreement outlining North Korea’s first moves to disarmament.—AP