hankyoreh

The South Korean and U.S. nuclear envoys painted a gloomy picture of six-party nuclear disarmament talks on Monday, saying that the future of the negotiating forum depends on the communist North.

South Korea's top nuclear negotiator Chun Yung-woo and his American counterpart Christopher Hill were visibly downcast as they headed for what was expected to be a final day of negotiations in the talks which opened five days ago.

A South Korean negotiator, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the countries were spurring last-minute efforts to cut a deal with the communist North, but an agreement still remained out of reach.

"Currently, we cannot be either optimistic nor pessimistic," the official told reporters.

The talks stumbled over what U.S. and Japanese delegates said was an unrealistic North Korean demand for energy aid. In the absence of a breakthrough, China proposed Sunday that Monday be the last day of the talks.

"It is up to the North Koreans. I think we've put everything on the table... They just need to make a decision," Hill told reporters as he left his hotel Monday morning. "I don't think there's any need to do any more bargaining."

A South Korean official close to the negotiation process, however, later hinted the current impasse may also be due to other issues, saying, "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed."

"We have expectations, and a simple nuclear freeze will simply not do," the official told reporters, while asking not to be identified citing ongoing diplomacy. "We cannot accept simple freezing" of North Korea's nuclear facilities.

Hill said on Saturday he and his North korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan had understood that "we use the word shut down because we are going in one direction."

Chun also sounded less than hopeful, saying early Monday: "The skies of Beijing are brighter than ever, but the future of the six-party talks is nowhere to be found."

Hill, Chun and other delegates, however, expressed hope for a last-minute breakthrough.

Specifics of the North's demands were not officially known, but negotiation sources said the country demanded 2 million tons of fuel oil as a reward for its first steps to disarm.

Hill said late Sunday night that the scale of the North's energy demand is something that makes further progress "impossible."

The North Korean demand is more than what it got in a 1994 agreement with the U.S. designed to defuse its first nuclear crisis. At that time, the North was promised two power-generating light-water reactors with a combined capacity of 2,000 megawatts plus 500,000 tons of fuel oil annually as interim aid.

The 1994 deal fell through in late 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of pushing a secret uranium-enrichment arms program, in addition to its known plutonium-based program. The North has denied the accusations.

The latest dispute in Beijing stems from a Chinese proposal broached on Friday that the North be given energy aid in exchange for taking the first steps to shutting down its key weapons-related facilities, including a 5-megawatt reactor.

Hill said negotiators were unable to persuade North Korea to lower the scale of its demand.

"We want to make progress on implementation, but we can't do it in a way that will make it impossible to make further progress because we are not interested in stopping at one step," he said late Sunday night.

Japan's chief delegate Kenichiro Sasae said that North Korea was asking too much for too little in return.

"The problem is that North Korea has excessive expectations about this, and unless it reconsiders this issue, an agreement will be difficult," Kyodo News quoted him as saying.

Hill warned that the six-party talks, which began in 2003, would be "dealt a significant setback" should this round end without progress.

Resolution of the nuclear tension has added urgency after Pyongyang set off an underground nuclear blast in October.

Chun tried to keep the momentum afloat, calling on North Korea to make "reasonable demands" and also on other nations to take corresponding measures.

"The broadness and speed of actual denuclearization measures for North Korea to take, and how much we can give, that's the real issue," he said late Sunday night.

Beijing, Feb. 12 (Yonhap News)