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NEW YORK CITY: The United States and North Korea have
launched groundbreaking talks in a first step toward normalizing
ties and cementing Pyongyang’s commitment to scrapping its nuclear
arms programs.
Less than three weeks after the
reclusive Stalinist regime agreed to freeze its key nuclear
facility, US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill met with
his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye Gwan Monday before hosting his
visitor to dinner at New York’s grand Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
It was the highest level meeting
held in the United States between the two nuclear rivals since
October 2000.
Hill, who arrived for the talks
in a yellow taxi in an apparent bid to avoid the attention of a
battery of reporters and photographers, said the meeting which would
continue on Tuesday was aimed at setting the pace for bilateral
relations, including North Korea’s possible removal from a US list
of state terrorism sponsors.
“These were some preliminary
discussions,” Hill told reporters after the four-hour talks late
Monday.
He told The New York Times
earlier that the two-day meeting was aimed at crafting an agenda
“to work on our bilateral relationship,” including criteria for
North Korea to be removed from the state-sponsor-of-terrorism list
and for scrapping longstanding US trade sanctions against the
hardline communist regime.
He also said he would be
“pressing for disclosure” of all of the nuclear programs of
North Korea, whose defiant atomic weapons test in October last year
drew unprecedented UN sanctions.
Kim, often guarded with his
comments, said he was optimistic about the talks.
“I think everything will go
well,” he told South Korea’s news agency Yonhap.
Kim also reportedly told his
South Korean counterpart Chun Yung Woo in separate talks in New York
that North Korea was willing to shut down its nuclear plants in an
“irreversible” manner.
US officials say the meeting in
New York is just a small step toward improving relations with the
reclusive Asian Marxist state that US President George W. Bush in
2002 famously included as part of his “axis of evil.”
But analysts describe it as a
breakthrough in efforts to end more than 50 years of feuding since
the US led an international force against the North in the 1950-53
Korean War, which has never officially ended.
The bilateral talks also meet a
long-standing condition set by North Korea for abandoning its
nuclear ambitions, and are aimed at smoothing implementation of a
landmark agreement reached with Pyongyang on February 13.
--AFP
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