January 06, 2008	Sunday	Zilhaj 26, 1428

WASHINGTON: American and North Korean officials traded charges on Friday over the lagging effort to shut down Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, raising new doubts about an initiative that the Bush administration has hoped would yield a rare diplomatic success.

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry declared that it had fulfilled a commitment to provide US officials with a full list of its nuclear activities before a Dec 31, deadline and intended to do no more.

“As far as the nuclear declaration on which wrong opinion is being built up by some quarters is concerned, (North Korea) has done what it should do,” the ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

US officials insisted that Pyongyang had not yet provided the declaration that it had promised on two occasions last year.

“The North Koreans need to get about the business of completing the declaration,” said Sean McCormack, the chief State Department spokesman. “It is another data point that will indicate that they are serious about denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.”

In 2007, the North Korean government pledged a step-by-step programme of disabling and then dismantling its nuclear complex in return for various rewards, including fuel oil, steel products and normalization of diplomatic relations.

By the end of 2007, North Korea was to have dismantled a decrepit reactor at Yongbyon and disclosed all nuclear assets and activities, including its inventory of bombs and fissile materials and a uranium enrichment programme that Pyongyang so far has denied.

But as the year-end deadline passed without completion of the nuclear inventory or full disabling of the reactor, criticism has grown in the United States that Kim Jong Il’s government is following a pattern of probing to see what it can obtain without giving up the nuclear program it considers a precious asset.

US officials, who have clung to optimism despite a series of snags, said it was important not to overlook that North Korea said in its statement that it remained committed to the effort.

“I think we’re seeing progress on parts of this agreement,” said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman.

But Robert Einhorn, a former senior US official on non-proliferation, said North Korea’s statement might be more that just bluster aimed at improving its bargaining position in talks with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia. Pyongyang regards secrecy about its nuclear programme as a “strategic asset” and simply might be unwilling to come clean, said Einhorn, who is now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Obviously, a failure to make a full and accurate declaration will cast real doubt on whether they are willing to get rid of their nuclear capability completely,” he said.

For that reason, he added, it was “potentially a show stopper” for the six-nation denuclearization talks.

North Korean officials and the US negotiating team, headed by Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, had discussed what the nuclear inventory declaration would include, American officials have said. US officials hoped those discussions would avoid a later confrontation over an inadequate declaration.

But on Friday, North Korea said it had offered the United States a document in November, which the Americans apparently found insufficient. The North Koreans said that although the US officials wanted more talks, Pyongyang had had “enough discussions”.

The ministry’s statement again denied that the North Koreans had aided Syria in a nuclear weapons program, calling that allegation “a fiction”. US officials have demanded to know whether North Korea had a hand in building an alleged Syrian nuclear facility that was reportedly bombed by Israel in early September.

The North Koreans said that in response to American suspicions that Pyongyang had imported aluminium tubes for uranium enrichment, they had showed US officials a military site in which aluminium tubes were used for other purposes.

The North Koreans accused the United States of failing to honour its commitment to take North Korea off the US list of state sponsors of terrorism and to lift sanctions under American trade laws.

The ministry asserted that North Korea has done more than other countries as part of the denuclearization deal.

But it said it refused to go further since the deal provided that each side would move ahead “action for action”.—Dawn/ The LAT-WP News Service