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North Korea is not ready to come back to six-party talks on its nuclear program this week because they sense a lack of trust, Thai Foreign Minister Kantathi Suphamongkhon said Sunday. After a meeting with North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun in Pyongyang, Kantathi said, "The North Korean foreign minister told me what he had in mind, what had caused North Korea not to be able to participate in the six-party talks scheduled for Monday."
Participants agreed to come back from a three-week recess in the week of Aug. 29 after failing to reach agreement on a statement of principles in 13 days of negotiations.
A South Korean official said, "I understand Chinese chief negotiator Wu Dawei, who has been in the North since Saturday, will bring with him a date to restart the talks on Tuesday." But he warned it was ¡°not a good sign¡± if a date is not chosen soon and only an announcement to delay them is made. If talks fail to reconvene this week, it will be difficult to start them next week as well because Chinese President Hu Jintao is scheduled to meet U.S. President George W. Bush on Sept. 7, so U.S. and Chinese delegations would be unable to adjust their schedules.
All participants except Pyongyang want talks to resume as soon as possible. The negotiations went into recess after they failed to agree on North Korea's right to use nuclear energy peacefully and the scale of its nuclear dismantlement. The other five nations are unified in their position that North Korea must completely abandon all its nuclear weapons and related programs. Washington is also adamant that Pyongyang cannot be trusted with a civilian nuclear program.
Pyongyang is in a temper over Washington's appointment of a special envoy for North Korean human rights and ongoing South Korea-U.S. war games it sees as hostile. The North's Rodong Sinmun daily said Saturday the envoy¡¯s appointment was a "very inauspicious act calling a whirlwind in the path to the six-party talks." It warned, "If the United States continues to act this way, we will have no choice but to change our thinking." On Wednesday, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman called the joint military exercises, which simulate an emergency on the Korean Peninsula, ¡°an act of bad faith on the part of the U.S.¡± adding dialogue and confrontation could not coexist.
However, a South Korean official said in the past such statements from Pyongyang would inevitably have constituted a justification before breaking talks, but the tone and manner of the complaints this time indicated that was not what North Korea had in mind. He added Pyongyang was under great pressure since even China could abandon it if it sabotages the talks again.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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