TOKYO: Spurred by fears of a possible North Korean nuclear test, the United States and its Asian allies have stepped up a diplomatic offensive to bring the Pyongyang government back to stalled disarmament talks, although analysts say the effort has yet to show any signs of yielding results. With tensions rising in East Asia as North Korea refuses to return to talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear weapons programmes, US officials held a meeting last Friday with North Korean diplomats in New York, US officials confirmed on Thursday.

The meeting was first reported by Japan’s Asahi newspaper on Thursday. Later, White House spokesman Trent Duffy told reporters travelling with President Bush to Milwaukee that the two countries had “working-level contacts” last week in New York, where North Korea has a representative office at the United Nations. “This channel was used to reiterate the message directly that the North Koreans need to return to the six-party talks without conditions,” he said. He said there has not been a response from the North Koreans.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided to send envoy Joseph DeTrani to New York last Friday after Pyongyang indicated in a statement last week that it wanted to hear directly from Washington, said a senior administration official familiar with the talks. North Korea’s official KCNA news service has hinted that Pyongyang might be willing to return to the negotiating table if it could determine the validity of recent statements by Rice. In the meeting, DeTrani repeated those statements that the United States recognizes North Korea as a sovereign state, that it has no intention to attack or invade and that Washington would agree to have “direct contacts” with North Korea during six-nation talks, the official said. Direct contacts is a euphemism for bilateral talks which have taken place in each round of the six-party talks. The participants in the six-party talks are the United States, China, Russia, Japan and North and South Korea. Washington has refused to hold direct talks with Pyongyang outside the six-nation framework.

The official stressed that the session in New York was not a negotiating session. He said the North Koreans listened to DeTrani’s statement and said they would send it to Pyongyang and relay a response. Rice decided that “this is a time of a lot of escalation and perhaps it was not a bad time to pass the message directly,” the official said. On several occasions Washington has held so-called “backdoor” meetings with North Korean diplomats in New York. The conversation last Friday — in which DeTrani, the US special envoy on disarmament talks, and Jim Foster, the head of the State Department’s Office of Korean Affairs, met North Korea’s Ambassador to the United Nations Pak Gil Yon and his deputy, Han Song Ryol — marked the first such meeting in six months, according to a US official in Tokyo. Analysts described it a sign that Washington is beginning to respond to calls from other nations involved in the talks — particularly China and South Korea — to be more flexible in dealing with the North Koreans. Both US and Japanese officials have begun to openly talk about taking North Korea before the UN Security Council and imposing possible economic sanctions — a step the North Koreans have said they would consider “an act of war.”

“The US has now shown its maximum flexibility to bring North Korea back to the six party talks,” Hajime Izumi, professor of international relations and Korean studies at Japan’s University of Shizuoka, said on Thursday. “The US has offered to recognize North Korea as a sovereign state. Now the ball is in North Korea’s court. The question is how North Korea will respond. I don’t think North Korea will come back to the talks.” North Korea is giving every indication lately that luring it back to the six-party talks will be a difficult task. South Korea, in rare bilateral talks with the North starting on Monday, intensively pressed the Pyongyang government to return to the bargaining table and formally recognize the seriousness of the crisis over its declared nuclear weapons arsenal.

South Korea’s insistence on such a mention extended the talks by an extra day and a half. But the talks between the two Koreas concluded on Thursday with North Korea making no such promises. The two sides instead signed a less specific pledge “to improve South-North relations and to work for peace on the Korean peninsula.” Nevertheless, the South Koreans agreed to begin shipping 200,000 tons of fertilizer to the North on Saturday based on humanitarian concerns for impoverished North Koreans.

“It will provide help to normalize dialogue between the South and North that had been stalled for 10 months and a peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear problem,” South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young was quoted as saying in Seoul by his spokesman after the statement was released. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service