hankyoreh

Wu Dawei, the deputy foreign minister of China who is also the host of a six-nation forum on the denuclearization of North Korea, arrived in Pyongyang on Monday, according to a December 18 report by the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s state-run news agency.

Related North Korean officials and an official of the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang greeted Wu, according to the news agency.

During his three-day stay, Wu is reportedly planning to meet with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan, who is also North Korea’s chief negotiator in the six-party talks. The two will discuss a promise made by Pyongyang to declare its nuclear weapons programs by the end of the year. Wu will also aim to make arrangements for the next meeting of the chief negotiators involved in the six-party talks, which had been scheduled to take place this month but were postponed due to uncertainty about the status of North Korea’s declaration.

The disablement of nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, part of a broad aid-for-denuclearization agreement reached in February by the nations involved in the six-party talks, has been reported to be proceeding as planned. Experts have been transferring spent fuel rods from the five-megawatt nuclear reactor to water tanks since last week.

The participants in the six-nation talks, the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, have agreed to complete this process within the next three months. The agreement to push the disablement schedule beyond the year-end deadline was a compromise made with respect to safety considerations.

Meanwhile, South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon and U.S. State Secretary Condoleezza Rice met in Paris on December 17 and shared a view that, once North Korea provides a complete declaration of its nuclear programs, it should rapidly enter the dismantlement phase.

They also reconfirmed that the United States would provide economic assistance to North Korea and remove the nation from its list of states supporting terrorism “at an appropriate time,” when the North provides a full disclosure of its nuclear activities and completed disablement of its nuclear facilities.


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