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WASHINGTON: The White House said Wednesday that it
could move to take North Korea off a terrorism blacklist “quite
soon” after—and if—the North delivers an accounting of its
nuclear programs.
Washington hoped the secretive
Stalinist nation would provide its long overdue “declaration” as
early as Thursday, although a senior US official has already said
that an inventory of Pyongyang’s atomic arsenal will come later.
Asked how quickly a full
accounting would trigger removal from the US list of state sponsors
of terrorism, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino replied,
“We’ll have to wait and see. It could be quite soon if that were
to happen.”
“We just don’t know if
they’re actually going to do it,” said Perino.
Washington also plans to remove
North Korea from the Trading with the Enemy Act, a law restricting
trade with countries hostile to the United States, leaving Cuba as
the only country affected by that legislation.
Separately, US President George
W. Bush sought to dampen anger from close ally Japan, which says
Pyongyang must first come clean on abductions of Japanese nationals,
in a telephone call with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.
Bush stressed that he grasped
“the importance of the abductee issue,” said Perino, who
indicated that resolving the matter would not be a precondition for
taking North Korea off the terrorism list.
Perino said the US position had
not changed since US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signaled in
a mid-June speech that Bush could move to take North Korea off the
two blacklists upon receipt of the declaration.
Rice, vising Kyoto, Japan on
Thursday, said the United States expects North Korea to “take
seriously” Tokyo’s demands to resolve the fate of Japanese
abducted during the Cold War.
“We understand that this will
probably take some time to resolve
. . . but we are continuing
to expect progress,” Rice told reporters after arriving in Japan
for a Group of Eight (G8) meeting.
“We’re continuing to expect
the North Koreans to take this issue seriously because it is a major
issue for Japan and it’s a major issue for the United States,”
Rice said.
--AFP
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