Seoul plans to expand on willingness to aid North Korea, aide says

South Korea will dangle the prospect of expanded economic and humanitarian aid before the North Koreans in its keynote speech at six-party talks this week, a senior Seoul official said yesterday. The two Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia will sit down together Wednesday in Beijing to try to defuse the threat posed by an ambitious North Korean nuclear weapons program.
“We will urge North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arms program in a verifiable and irreversible manner and to comply with pacts on a nuclear-free peninsula,” the government source said. “At the same time, we will present plans to assist North Korea.”
The economic assistance package would include Seoul’s support for North Korean membership in international financial organizations, the official said, as well as an energy assistance package.
Seoul’s keynote address will also emphasize the need for peace on the peninsula and in Northeast Asia, not just the removal of the nuclear threat alone.
Seoul has paid special attention to the wording of its chief delegate’s opening statement, a foreign ministry official said, because the meeting of the two Koreas and the four superpowers is unprecedented. “The keynote speech was drafted based on what Seoul, Washington and Tokyo agreed at their trilateral talks on Aug. 13 and 14,” the ministry official said. “Seoul will stress that the aim of the peninsula’s denuclearization must be achieved at any cost.”
At the plenary talks, the official said, Seoul will try to limit the discussions to nuclear problem in order to prevent them from being sidetracked by issues such as Japan’s desire to discuss North Korea’s missile threats and abduction of its citizens. Seoul will also push for follow-up six-party meetings, he said.
Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck and his team are scheduled to leave for Beijing this afternoon. The 10-member delegation will meet with the U.S. and Japanese delegations tomorrow to discuss their negotiating strategies before the main talks begin.
Meanwhile, a North Korean official gave a glimpse of Pyeongyang’s demands. “If the United States provides assurances to the North Korean regime and agrees to compensation for the power shortage incurred by the halted light-water reactor project, we have the intention to begin full-scale diplomatic relations with the United States,” Ri Jong-hyok, vice chairman of the North’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, reportedly told Representative Kim Seong-ho of the Millennium Democratic Party. Mr. Kim quoted the North Korean official’s comments yesterday, when he returned from a six-day trip to Pyeongyang for an inter-Korean academic conference.

by Oh Young-hwan, Lee Jung-min