Agence France-Presse,
A US envoy said Wednesday that North Korea's nuclear disarmament is finally back on track, with UN inspectors set to return next week and six-nation negotiations seen resuming in early July.
North Korea had refused to implement a breakthrough February deal to shut its nuclear reactor due to a long-running feud over its assets frozen in the Chinese territory of Macau.
With the funds finally returned, North Korea has invited inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, to the country to seal its Yongbyon reactor.
Christopher Hill, the US pointman on North Korea, said that the IAEA team was expected to return next Tuesday and that six-nation talks on the next stage of disarmament would likely resume in early July.
“I would think it would be early July,” Hill said of the next talks.
“I'd rather not on the Fourth of July, but I would like it immediately after,” he said, referring to the US Independence Day holiday. “We have a lot of work to do and very little time to do it.”
North Korea threw out IAEA inspectors in December 2002 amid an escalating crisis with the United States. The communist state tested an atom bomb last year.
Amid the resolution of the banking row, North Korea on Tuesday tested its third short-range missile in a month, according to South Korea's military. But Hill said the test was routine and “not a political or diplomatic act.”
In the six-nation February deal with the US, Russia, Japan, China and South Korea, Pyongyang promised to shut down its Yongbyon reactor, the source of raw material for bomb-making plutonium, in return for badly needed fuel oil.
But it refused to comply with the April deadline until it received the frozen assets. In a complex deal, the United States said the cash finally returned Tuesday to North Korean hands via a bank in Russia.
There were “no bumps in the road right now, but I'm sure there will be in the future,” Hill said.
“It's going to be a very long process. We're going to have problems. We're going to have to get through the problems,” he said. “And we'll have a couple of good days and a couple of bad days and just continue like that.”
China, the host of the talks and main ally of North Korea — officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea — welcomed Pyongyang's decision to allow the inspectors to return.
“We believe the move shows the DPRK's political will to implement the February 13 joint document,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters Tuesday.
In the second phase of the February deal, the North is supposed to declare and permanently disable all its nuclear programmes.
Hill said he wanted the six-nation talks to take place after the first stage of shutting down the reactor was complete.
“We have to somehow schedule (the talks) in a way that we will be talking about the next phase and not about the first phase,” Hill said.
He hoped the talks would pave the way for a six-way meeting of foreign ministers, possibly on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum in the Philippines on August 2.
