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BEIJING (Reuters): North Korea is prepared to return to six-country talks on its nuclear weapons programme at any time now that it has “gained a defensive position” with a nuclear test, a senior envoy of the communist state said on Tuesday.
But Kim Kye-gwan told reporters on arrival for talks in Beijing that North Korea still had differences to narrow with the United States, which has squeezed Pyongyang's external sources of financing for more than a year.
North Korea agreed to return to the six-party talks, which it had boycotted for a year, after its October 9 underground nuclear test triggered international condemnation and U.N.-backed sanctions.
“Because after the nuclear test, we have gained a defensive position against those who are trying to suppress us. Now we are in a very confident position and so we are ready to come back to the talks any time,” Kim told reporters.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted Kim as saying: “We have many issues in dispute (with the United States). We have to narrow them to some extent.”
The six-party talks bring together the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. Envoys from all countries except Russia are in Beijing for preparatory discussions.
DANCE PARTNERS
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill is due to meet his Chinese and South Korean counterparts in Beijing on Tuesday, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said.
“I am here because of the kind invitation of the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Mr. Hill,” Kim told reporters. “He is going to introduce me to his dancing rhythm.”
A U.S. State Department spokesman said on Monday that Hill may meet Kim, but the embassy spokeswoman declined to comment.
Hill told reporters on arrival on Monday that he anticipated the six-party talks “will get going at some point very soon”.
North Korea agreed to return to the talks after Washington said it was willing to address its concerns about financial restrictions, tightened in September 2005 when U.S. regulators named a Macau bank as a conduit for illicit North Korean cash from currency counterfeiting and drug trafficking.
U.S. and South Korean officials have said the new round of talks must make substantive progress on implementing an agreement in principle reached last year or risk losing credibility.
Under that agreement, North Korea said it was committed “to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programmes”.
In return, the other nations held out economic, political and security incentives.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said the United States wanted North Korea to return to the six-party talks with the intention of standing by its word.
Burns said Hill could find out in “a day or two” whether Pyongyang was ready to begin moving forward on its commitment to abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programmes.
“If we go back to the six-party talks it won't be just to have endless negotiations … it will be to see that agreement implemented,” Burns told the Asia Society in New York on Monday.
“We're ready — the question is are the North Koreans ready?”
North Korea's KCNA news agency meanwhile resumed its bellicose rhetoric directed, as usual, against the United States.
“The reality goes to prove that force is the only means of countering the United States which behaves as it pleases, showing off its strength, just as a mad dog should be dealt with a stick,” the agency quoted the state-run Minju Joson newspaper as saying.
(Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz and Kim Yeon-hee in Seoul and Michelle Nichols in New York)
