North Korea talks end with deep divisions laid bare

12.00pm

BEIJING - Six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis ended on Saturday without a breakthrough but a senior US official said the meetings had advanced Washington's agenda of disarming Pyongyang.

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing closed the four-day session saying all sides had agreed to set up a working group and hold the next set of talks in Beijing before the end of June.

"Differences, even serious differences, still exist," Li said at the closing ceremony, without specifying what gaps remained.

China's chief negotiator, Wang Yi, cited an "extreme lack of trust" between the US and North Koreans and said further discussions were needed on the scope of both the North's proposal to freeze its nuclear programs and the US demand for dismantling all atomic arms schemes.

But a senior US official declared the talks, which also involved South Korea, Japan and Russia "very successful," saying all but Pyongyang had agreed to the goal of a nuclear-free North.

"The event has exceeded my expectations in a very important respect. It's been very successful in moving the agenda toward our goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling (CVID) of DPRK nuclear programs," the US official said. "CVID is now more on the table than ever."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was also upbeat despite acknowledging that "key differences remain." He said in a statement the United States welcomed the results of "very serious discussions" and cited as progress the agreements to make the talks more regular.

After the first inconclusive round in August, it took six months of intense shuttle diplomacy to organize new talks, something the United States wanted to avoid repeating. It had proposed a formal schedule for fresh negotiations and establishing groups that would meet in between the rounds.

Russia's chief delegate, Alexander Losyukov, said the talks achieved "modest" results. But he called the working groups "a reasonable base for the continuation of discussions of those problems arising from the different positions."

Analysts said, however, that Washington and Pyongyang could both dig in their heels in this US presidential election year.

"North Korea does not have to strike any agreement now, ahead of the November election in the United States," said Yu Suk-ryul of Seoul's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. "The United States has a need to avoid collapse of the talks before the election."

DEVIL IN DETAILS

China's Li said the second round featured substantial dialogue and made "a big step forward."

"The road is longer and more bumpy. But time is on our side. Time is on the side of peace," Li said.

There was little evidence the gulf between North Korea and the United States had narrowed. In the end they settled on a chairman's summary statement instead of a joint declaration.

"They (the Americans) haven't succeeded, but they haven't failed and they can always say that the process is under way," said Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley.

North Korea, whose 11th-hour rejection of language in a proposed agreement prolonged the talks for hours and prevented the parties from signing a joint declaration, repeated its denial that it had an enriched uranium weapons program.

"We believe the insistence of the raising of the HEU (highly enriched uranium) issue by the US side is very much related to the position of the US Bush administration, who based this assertion on false information," Kim Gye-gwan, head of the North Korean delegation, told reporters after the talks.

The crux of the dispute and the reason for the six-party talks is a US accusation -- which Pyongyang denies -- that North Korea is pursuing a uranium enriching program for bombs.

The US official in Beijing brushed off the denials but a Japanese diplomat said the United States had not shown any evidence the North had such a program.

The US official said the American goal of completely dismantling all of the North's nuclear arms programs had "essentially been accepted by all of the participants except the DPRK." DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"The DPRK did say and has said that it will dismantle its nuclear programs. The devil, of course, is in the details," said the official.

Asked about the North's offer to give up its military nuclear program but not its peaceful one, the official said: "The problem is, I am not aware of any peaceful programs in the DPRK."

Japan chief negotiator Mitoji Yabunaka voiced support for the US goal of a eliminating the North's nuclear programs, which he said were a "grave threat to our country."

FREEZE, INSPECTIONS

The North wants aid and a security guarantee in return for a nuclear freeze. "When we freeze nuclear activities I believe it will be followed by inspections. When, who and how we do the inspections will be determined in future talks," said Kim.

Officials in Washington said US negotiators outlined a series of coordinated steps that Washington could take if the North agreed to the complete dismantling of its nuclear programs.

Initially, aid would come in the form of energy assistance from other parties to the talks, but the United States would be at the table, the officials said.

A similar deal was forged between the United States and impoverished North Korea in 1994, but it fell apart in October 2002 after Washington said Pyongyang had privately admitted to the enriched uranium program.

- REUTERS