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SEOUL: Stepped up contact with Pyongyang, a big incentive package from Seoul and increased international pressure were behind North Korea’s decision to return to stalled talks on its nuclear ambitions, analysts said on Sunday.
North Korea said it would do its utmost to make progress when the six-party talks on its nuclear weapons programmes resume. Analysts said it was too early to tell whether the North would seek true progress at the talks or try to switch the focus to general disarmament and away from its growing atomic arsenal.
North Korea announced on Saturday it had agreed to return to stalled six-country talks on its nuclear weapons programmes in the week of July 25 after a break of more than a year. The North’s official KCNA news agency broke the news and a US official then confirmed Pyongyang was returning to the table.
North Korea, whose official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, said it decided to return to the talks after “the US side clarified its official stand to recognise the DPRK as a sovereign state, not to invade it and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks”.
Over the past few months, US officials have made comments confirming Washington’s commitment to all those points. Analysts thus saw the statement from North Korea as merely a pretext.
“They believed that if they didn’t come back to the table soon, actions would be taken,” said Derek Mitchell, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
US officials have said their patience was wearing thin and if North Korea did not return to the table they might take Pyongyang to the UN Security Council, where it could face possible sanctions.
There have been increased contacts among officials from Pyongyang, Washington and Seoul in recent weeks. US officials have met in recent weeks with North Korea’s diplomats at the United Nations using the so-called “New York channel”.
THE NUCLEAR CLUB: Pyongyang said that the US recognition of its sovereignty, a pledge not to attack it and its decision to hold bilateral discussions at the six-party talks can be interpreted as Washington retracting comments from US officials who labelled North Korea an “outpost of tyranny”, KCNA cited a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
The spokesman also said “Japan has done nothing” to help the six-party process, KCNA reported on Sunday. North Korea has previously said Tokyo does not belong at the six-party talks.
Last month, South Korea’s unification minister had a rare meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, where Kim said North Korea could return to the talks as early as July, if the United States met certain conditions.
A South Korean Foreign Ministry official said in addition to these and other reported contacts with Pyongyang there had been numerous meetings behind the scenes of representatives from the six countries — North and South Korea,
China, Japan, Russia and the United States — involved in the talks.
That had helped build up trust among the parties, he said.
“What we have is a result of those exchanges,” the official said, referring to the Beijing meeting over the weekend of the US’s top nuclear envoy, Christopher Hill, and the North’s vice-minister of foreign affairs, Kim Kye-gwan, that set the stage for the North’s announcement to return to the talks.
The official said Seoul’s recent offer of an incentive package for the North to reach a negotiated settlement for curbing its nuclear ambitions may have helped persuade Pyongyang to return to the talks.
Seoul has said only the package goes beyond any other made.
Media reports said the plan involved a huge injection of aid and technical assistance akin to the US Marshall Plan that was instrumental in putting post-war Western Europe back on its feet.
Lee Dong-bok, an expert on North Korea’s negotiating tactics, played down the timing of the North Korean announcement, which came as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived for a trip to Asia to revive the talks.
Lee said after high-level contacts between Seoul and Washington, Seoul had been able to convince Pyongyang that if it did not come back to talks, Seoul might not be able to help it.
“North Korea has decided that unless they announce a return to the talks, they will put the South Korean government in a very difficult position to manoeuvre,” Lee said.
Yun Deok-min of South Korea’s Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security added another factor.
Pyongyang may have been concerned international aid would dry up if it did not return. That could have made it harder to fight severe food shortages aid workers say could worsen this year.—Reuters
