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N. Korea promises results from talks

Beijing: The six-party talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear programme commenced a fresh round here on Thursday.

The focus of this session is on how Pyongyang will go about fully disclosing and then dismantling all its nuclear plants and programmes, possibly by the end of this year.

The six parties — the United States, Japan, Russia, host China and the two Koreas — held a plenary session to formally open the negotiations on Thursday afternoon. In the morning, a series of bilateral meetings were also held.

North Korea has raised hopes of real progress at the talks. “We have agreed not to disappoint you by producing a result out of the six-party talks,” the DPRK’s chief envoy Kim Kye-gwan told reporters late on Wednesday, following a one-on-one dinner meeting with his U.S. counterpart Christopher Hill.

Mr. Hill was more circumspect. “We would like to do more, the DPRK would like to do less. [But] we will figure out a way through that, this is not a big gap,” he said on Thursday morning.

The resumption of the talks comes in the wake of a veiled reference to the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal by Pyongyang with the leading official North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun accusing the United States of adopting a discriminatory policy over nuclear issues.

The newspaper said in a commentary out on Tuesday that the U.S. was taking harsh measures to try and deny some countries access to peaceful uses of nuclear technology while turning a blind eye to the nuclear weapons programmes of “those countries that share the idea with it and those of its satellite countries.”

The six-nation talks mechanism began in 2003 but failed to stop North Korea from conducting its first atomic weapons test in October last year. This year, however, there was a breakthrough when the parties agreed in February that Pyongyang would scrap its nuclear programme in return for economic, diplomatic and security concessions.

Following North Korea’s closing and sealing of its main nuclear reactor in July, in return for 50,000 tonnes of fuel oil, this week’s session is aimed at settling on the details of the second phase of the February accord. This would include the DPRK making a full disclosure of all of its atomic programmes and setting a timeframe for disabling them.

One potential flash point in the coming days may be whether or not the North admits to uranium enrichment projects, something Pyongyang has so far vigorously denied despite U.S. accusations to the contrary.

Also unresolved is the question of whether or not the U.S. is willing to remove the DPRK from its State Department’s list of sponsors of terrorism. This round of talks is scheduled to end on September 30.

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