North Korea says can return to atomic talks in July

SEOUL - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il said his country was willing to end its year-long boycott of stalled six-party nuclear talks and return to the negotiating table in July if the United States showed it respect.

Kim said the communist state, which fears the United States plans to invade it and declared in February it possessed nuclear weapons, was willing to "give up everything" if it received security guarantees.

"If we have security guarantees, there is no reason to have a single nuclear weapon," South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, who met Kim in the North Korean capital Pyongyang on Friday, quoted him as saying.

"He said if the United States firmly recognises North Korea as a partner and respects it, North Korea can return to six-party talks, even in July," said Chung on his return home.

The North had never rejected or given up on the talks, it simply wanted to "stand up against the United States because it looked down on us", Chung said.

Washington said earlier this month that Pyongyang had agreed to return to the talks on ending its suspected nuclear weapons programme but had set no date. The talks, which last took place in June 2004, bring together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

But Washington said it saw nothing new in Kim's comments.

"We're waiting for North Korean action and a date that they will return to the talks. We have no preconditions on their returning to the table," a senior administration official said.

At the rare meeting with the famously reclusive Kim, Chung pressed him to address growing regional concern over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Kim indicated North Korea was willing to return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) if the nuclear standoff was resolved and would accept intrusive inspections on its facilities, said Chung, the first senior South Korean official to the North's leader since April 2002.

"The joint declaration for the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula is still valid and it is the last will of President Kim Il-sung," Chung also quoted Kim as saying.
He was referring to a pact signed by the two Koreas in 1992. Kim Il-sung is the North's founder and Kim Jong-il's father.

Chung said he explained a "serious proposal" that South Korea was prepared to offer when the nuclear crisis was resolved. Kim said he would study it and respond to it.

The meeting between Kim and Chung coincided with celebrations in Pyongyang marking the fifth anniversary of the landmark summit in 2000 between Kim and then South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

Chung said Kim accepted his offer to resume the visits of the hundreds of thousand of families who were torn apart by the 1950-1953 Korean War.

Between 2000 and July 2004 nearly 10,000 people from both sides met family members living across the border. The meetings ended when North Korea broke off talks with Seoul in anger over its airlift of North Koreans refugees in Vietnam to South Korea.

Chung said Kim accepted as "an exciting idea" his proposal to hold such reunions over the Web and agreed to pursue it for launch on August 15.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun welcomed the meeting and said its length -- five hours -- showed Kim's "good intent." Last week, Roh met US President George W. Bush in Washington and the two renewed their commitment to resolve the nuclear crisis through diplomacy.

But a senior US official told the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors that Washington would examine other options if Pyongyang failed to return to the negotiating table.

He did not specify what options Washington would be prepared to consider.

Pyongyang expelled all IAEA inspectors in 2002 and later withdrew from the NPT, the first state to pull out of the global pact against the spread of nuclear arms.

- REUTERS