hankyoreh

Indonesia

By Son Won-je, Staff Writer

North Korea and South Korea agreed to joint efforts to resume the stalled six-party talks on the North Korea nuclear issue.

South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan and his North Korean counterpart Pak Ui-chun held a brief meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum, a South Korean official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity Saturday. It was the first time that top diplomats from the both countries met since a forum in Singapore in July of 2008.

The day before, newly appointed North Korean chief nuclear negotiator Ri Yong-ho told reporters after two-hour meeting with his counterpart Wi Sung-lac, “During the talks, we agreed to make joint efforts to reopen the six-party talks as soon as possible.”

Wi said, “We agreed to continue to make joint efforts in the process of negotiations for denuclearization.”

“I had a very constructive and useful conversation with my counterpart,” he added.

Observers are predicting that this meeting will mark a turning point in the drawn out tug-of-war of the nuclear conflict toward a resumption of the talks.

A government official noted the significance of the meeting, saying, “The inter-Korean denuclearization talks we proposed last January have begun.”

No meetings between senior North Korean and South Korean representatives to the six-party talks have taken place in the two years and six months after December 2008, when a meeting of senior representatives took place in Beijing. Friday’s meeting was attended by four other people, including Cho Hyun-dong, head of the North Korean nuclear program diplomatic planning team in the South Korean Foreign Ministry, and Choe Son-hui, deputy chief of the United States bureau of North Korea’s Foreign Ministry.

Prior to the meeting, a South Korean official for the talks said, “No specific agenda was set, since there has been no precedent for separate denuclearization talks between South and North Korean senior representatives to the six-party talks during a period when the six-party talks are not being held.”

“They will be discussing a broad range of areas of interest for both sides with regard to denuclearization,” the official added.

The process leading up to Friday’s talks saw a tense battle of wills between North Korea and South Korea. The South Korean government insisted on holding inter-Korean denuclearization talks first in order to establish a forum for inter-Korean discussions on the nuclear issue and seize the initiative for resuming the six-party talks through a three-stage approach. Meanwhile, North Korea showed its intent to avoid inter-Korean dialogue and head straight for dialogue with the United States.

But with Seoul showing some signs of dialogue flexibility recently by withdrawing its link between apologies for the Cheonan sinking and Yeonpyeong Island attack and inter-Korean denuclearization talks and expressing hopes for a meeting between the two countries’ foreign ministers on the occasion of the ARF, signs of change were also detected in Pyongyang’s response.

Ri, who was not on the initial forum delegation list, boarded a plane to Bali unexpectedly on Thursday, and the meeting between senior representatives finally came to fruition Friday. North Korea issued an announcement Friday to South Korea, China, and Russia informing them that Ri had been appointed the country’s new senior representative to the six-party talks.

The inter-Korean meeting Friday is being interpreted as a clear green light for North Korea-U.S. dialogue and a resumption of the six-party talks.

Hurdles still remain, however. Chief among them is the clear difference in views between the two countries with regard to inter-Korean denuclearization talks. While South Korea has maintained that it would only be possible to proceed to North Korea-U.S. dialogue once the genuineness of North Korea's intent to denuclearize was confirmed to some degree through inter-Korean denuclearization talks, the trend in North Korea has been to dismiss them as a formal “rite of passage” on the way to dialogue with Washington and the six-party talks. Analysts said smooth progress in denuclearization negotiations could not be guaranteed in the event of a failure to overcome the two countries’ differing expectations.

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