US talks with North Korea to go ahead, says South Korea

3.30pm

SEOUL - Talks on North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons plans were likely to go ahead as scheduled in Beijing this week, a South Korean Foreign Ministry official said today.

There has been doubt about whether Washington will proceed with the talks with North Korea after Pyongyang sent mixed signals on Friday about whether it had started reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods that could be used to make atomic bombs.

"The talks are likely to go ahead as scheduled," a South Korean Foreign Ministry official told Reuters. He asked not to be identified by name.

China is taking part in the expected talks, but North Korea and the United States differ over Beijing's role at the table.

China has not officially confirmed the meeting is taking place. The talks are expected to be held from April 23 to 25.

Washington has also not definitively said the talks are going ahead since Friday's confusion. But US President George W. Bush said on Sunday he saw a "good chance" multilateral diplomacy would succeed.

Lee Jihyun, the foreign media spokeswoman for South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, said by telephone: "For now, I haven't heard anything that there is any change to the plans for the talks to take place."

In a move analysts saw as North Korean pressure tactics, Pyongyang issued a statement on Friday saying it was reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods -- a provocative step that would enable it to start making atomic bombs.

The United States later said the North Korean Foreign Ministry statement, issued in English, might have been mistranslated. A Korean version published on Saturday said the North was at the "final stage" before reprocessing.

Japan's top government spokesman, Yasuo Fukuda, said of Friday's North Korean statement: "We understand that it expressed the fact that North Korea has completed preparations to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and that reprocessing has not actually started.


"We hope the issue will be resolved in the process that is to begin," he told reporters.

The South Korean Unification Ministry said on Monday it had accepted a weekend proposal from North Korea to hold ministerial talks from April 27 to 29 in the North's capital, Pyongyang.

The North-South ministerial talks in Pyongyang will be the 10th such meeting on the divided peninsula in two years. All previous ministerial talks have focused on South Korean economic and food aid for the North.

Officials in Seoul said they expected Pyongyang to request food and fertiliser, but said the South Koreans would also press the North to resolve the nuclear impasse.

The nuclear standoff began in October when the North admitted it had an active covert programme to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear arms, in addition to a plutonium programme frozen under a 1994 pact between North Korea and the United States.

The North has denied making such an admission but subsequently restarted a nuclear reactor and expelled international nuclear inspectors.

North Korea filled its newspapers on Monday with blood-curdling anti-US slogans to be used this year to mark the 55th anniversary this September of the communist state.

"Let us resolutely shatter the high-handed and arbitrary practices and unilateralism of the US imperialists working arrogantly to materialise their wild ambitions for world supremacy," said one of the slogans, which are generally intended for a domestic rather than foreign audience.

- REUTERS