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Six-party talks from February 8

Pallavi Aiyar

Beijing: Six-party talks aimed at persuading North Korea to scrap its nuclear programme will restart on February 8, according to China's Foreign Ministry.

The last round of these multilateral negotiations took place in Beijing in late December but ended inconclusively. The talks include the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China.

The announcement of the date for their resumption on Tuesday came after a fortnight of hectic diplomacy which saw the chief negotiators of all the parties involved engage in several rounds of bilateral discussions.

Most significant were talks between Christopher Hill, the U.S. envoy and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan in Berlin, which have raised hope for progress when the negotiations resume again next week.

"There have been significant contacts between the various parties on how to move the talks forward and implement the joint statement," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said on Tuesday, at a regular news briefing in Beijing.

Ms Jiang was referring to a September 2005 joint statement that committed Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons in return for economic and security assurances. Next week's talks will be aimed at evolving a consensus on how to proceed with the implementation of this agreement.

"We believe that the six-party talks are a gradual and complicated process, but are nonetheless the best mechanism for arriving at the goal of denuclearising the Korean peninsula," Ms Jiang said. Chinese diplomacy has been credited with persuading North Korea back to the negotiating table; a period during which the DPRK tested a nuclear device.

Pyongyang's long boycott of talks resulted from a U.S. blacklisting of a Macau bank in which the DPRK had deposited $24 million.

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