North Korea nuclear talks snag on aid for Pyongyang
Source: Reuters
(Adds comments about uranium enrichment programme, paragraphs 10-12) By Teruaki Ueno and Chris Buckley BEIJING, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Talks to end North Korea's nuclear arms program fell short of an accord on Saturday as a dispute over how to compensate Pyongyang for taking disarmament steps clouded prospects for agreement on an initial plan. Envoys to the six-party talks from North and South Korea, the United States, Russia, Japan and host China focused on the energy and aid incentives Pyongyang would receive for curtailing its nuclear activities. But they have not closed differences and the talks will press into a fourth day Sunday. "If we can get closure on this issue, we can solve an overall problem and get a set of initial actions," the U.S. envoy, Christopher Hill, told reporters after a day of talks. Hill would not specify the dispute, but said it concerned one paragraph of a draft deal and warned failure to resolve it would augur badly for the six-party talks, which resumed in December after a hiatus from late 2005. "We are kind of reaching a point where we've got to solve this, and if we don't solve this I think it's sort of tough to reconvene the six parties," Hill said. A diplomatic source close to the talks said the dispute concerned the volume of energy and economic aid to North Korea, whose economy has struggled in isolation. "A huge gap remains between North Korea and the five countries in terms of figures and volume," the source said. Negotiators still hoped to agree on a joint statement spelling out Pyongyang's first disarmament steps and it was worth staying in China and trying to clinch the deal, Hill said. The talks could go another day or two, if not longer, he added. North Korea is under pressure to accept a deal, not least from China, its communist neighbor and backer lately angered by Pyongyang's nuclear brinksmanship. Some negotiators have said the proposed initial deal will demand North Korea shut down its Yongbyon nuclear plant, which produces plutonium that can be used in nuclear weapons. URANIUM ENRICHMENT The United States in 2002 also accused North Korea of a covert uranium enrichment programme, but U.S. officials no longer make a major public issue of it and some experts say Washington may have overstated or misread the intelligence. Physicist David Albright, who recently visited Pyongyang for high-level talks, told Reuters he believes the U.S. "analysis was flawed and no information has emerged supporting the claim of a large-scale North Korean centrifuge plant ... There may never have been a plant under construction or even planned." One senior U.S. official said, "I'm assuming they do have an enrichment programme but we don't know exactly where it is or what it's capabilities are. A lot of it is guesswork." South Korean envoy Chun Yung-woo said the parties' interests in the Beijing talks were not meshing easily, though the North had a firm position on how it would denuclearise. "As they like to say these days, we can't predict when the egg will hatch, but we know for sure that it's not an unfertilised egg," Chun said. The fresh momentum among the six sides came after U.S. and North Korean teams met for unprecedented talks in Berlin last month. That meeting cooled tension after Pyongyang's first nuclear test blast in October, which triggered U.N. sanctions. Japan's Kyodo news agency said North Korea had demanded energy aid equivalent to more than 2 million tonnes of fuel oil annually in exchange for initial steps toward abandoning its nuclear programmes. Kyodo also quoted Russian envoy Alexander Losyukov as saying assistance and the timing for when it should be given to North Korea are "the most difficult problems." Losyukov said differences between how the United States and North Korea interpreted the results of the Berlin meetings were hampering the talks, Interfax reported. In September 2005, envoys agreed a joint statement sketching out the nuclear disarmament steps Pyongyang needed to take to secure fuel and economic aid, as well as political acceptance from its foe, the United States. But that deal was pushed to the side after Washington accused North Korea in late 2005 of laundering income from counterfeiting U.S. currency and other illicit business. The ensuing crackdown on a bank in Macau enraged Pyongyang. The New York Times said officials at the White House and the State Department were preparing for a major announcement this weekend. Hill said that turning the September agreement into practical steps inevitably entailed contentious negotiations. "I'd love to come here and just pull a rabbit out of a hat, but in this business you've got to spend some time stuffing the rabbit down the hat," he said. (Additional reporting by Jack Kim, Benjamin Kang Lim, Nick Macfie and Ben Blanchard in Beijing and Carol Giacomo in Washington)
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