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The Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue in Seoul in Oct. 2010

A Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD) meeting will reportedly be taking place in Beijing later this month.

The next question is whether North Korea plans to attend the meeting - a “Track 1.5 dialogue” (half-government, half-civilian) for the participants of the Six-Party Talks to resolve the issue of Pyongyang’s nuclear program - after its aggressive push for dialogue in the wake of its seventh Korean Workers’ Party congress last month.

Multiple diplomatic sources reported on June 6 that the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego plans to stage the 26th NEACD meeting in Beijing in late June.

The NEACD is a Track 1.5 forum in which foreign affairs officials and scholars have been invited from the parties to the Six-Party Talks - South and North Korea, the US, Japan, China, and Russia - to share opinions on security in Northeast Asia. In the past, meetings have chiefly been attended by deputy representatives at the bureau director level.

Pyongyang has been represented at most meetings since 2002. For the 23rd meeting in Dalian, China, in 2012, the representative was Choe Son-hui, deputy director of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s North American affairs bureau and Pyongyang’s deputy representative to the Six-Party Talks.

But no one attended from North Korea at the 24th or 25th meetings, which were respectively held in San Diego and Tokyo in 2014 and 2015. Analysts are predicting that a representative could attend this time, as the event is taking place in China and Pyongyang has proposed inter-Korean military talks and sent KWP Central Committee deputy chairman Ri Su-yong to visit China since its KWP conference last month.

The IGCC has reportedly extended invitations to eligible participants from all six parties.

By Kim Jin-cheol, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]