SEOUL: North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator plans to visit the United States next month, a media report said Friday, amid renewed efforts to bring the communist nation back to international disarmament talks.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, quoting a diplomatic source, said the visit by Kim Kye-Gwan would be in return for a trip to Pyongyang in December by US envoy Stephen Bosworth.
“I believe the schedule for Kim’s visit has already been fixed,” it quoted the source as saying in a report from Beijing, where Kim has been holding talks with his Chinese counterparts. No precise date was mentioned.
China, which hosts six-nation nuclear disarmament talks, is trying to persuade the North to return to the negotiations which it quit last April — a month before its second atomic weapons test.
But this week’s meetings in Beijing have been hard going, according to media reports, with Pyongyang sticking to its demands that UN sanctions be lifted before it rejoins the nuclear dialogue.
The North also wants US agreement to hold talks about a formal peace treaty before it comes back to the forum also grouping South Korea, Japan and Russia.
It was unclear whether Kim’s visit would go ahead if the parties fail to agree on restarting the nuclear dialogue.
Yonhap said Wu Dawei, China’s chief nuclear negotiator who has been meeting Kim, would travel to other six-party member nations after the Lunar New Year this weekend.
“We exchanged important opinions with China on the matters of the peace treaty on the Korean peninsula and the resumption of the six-party talks,” Kim told reporters in Beijing Thursday.
“Results of the meeting will be made known later.”
China is North Korea’s only major ally, its main trade partner and its chief supplier of desperately needed food and oil. But it was not clear whether it would be able to coax the North back to dialogue.
The two sides were trying Thursday to narrow differences on economic assistance, Yonhap said.
South Korean officials estimate the North will run short of 1.29 million tons of grain this year, equivalent to almost four months’ supply.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s top political advisor Lynne Pascoe was due Friday to wind up a mission to North Korea aimed partly at reviving the disarmament talks.
Pascoe met Kim Yong-Nam, the North’s official number two leader on Thursday. He passed on a message from UN chief Ban Ki-moon to leader Kim Jong-Il, the North’s media said, but no details were given.
