US, North Korea call on each other to give ground
(AP)
Updated: 2005-08-08 09:45

The United States and North Korea urged each other to make concessions as deadlocked disarmament talks entered a three-week recess, with one envoy warning that an agreement could still be out of reach when talks resume, AP reported.

The adjournment came after 13 days of talks failed to produce a statement of principle to guide renewed negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons. The delegations said the six-nation talks would resume the week of August 29.

The U.S. envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, said talks stalled over the North's demand for the statement to include a promise that it be given a nuclear reactor. He said all five other delegations rejected that.

"We decided it was time to end it and go to recess, with the idea that they can go back and think about what they've been told, which is, they're not going to get a light-water reactor," Hill told reporters Sunday.

He expressed hope North Korea would drop the demand once its envoys explained the rejection, saying, "Perhaps people back in Pyongyang need to hear it directly."

But the North's chief envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, said that during the recess Washington should "change its policy on not letting us have any kind of nuclear activities."

The dispute is "one of the very important elements that led us to fail to come up with an agreement," Kim said at a news conference in the North Korean Embassy. He did not mention the reactor cited by Hill.

During the recess, the six governments "are supposed to maintain contact and consultations," said China's chief delegate, Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei. But he warned that even after they return from the recess, "I can't say for sure that we will reach agreement."

North Korea says that in exchange for renouncing nuclear weapons, it wants economic and energy aid, a peace treaty and normalized relations with Washington. It also wants the United States to remove any "nuclear threat" of its own from the Korean Peninsula.

The United States has some 32,500 military personnel in South Korea, but Washington says no nuclear weapons are deployed there and it has no intention of invading the North.

Hill said North Korea also wants its negotiating partners to provide a nuclear reactor to "demonstrate our commitment to their right to eventual civilian use" of nuclear technology.

A light-water reactor was promised to the North in the 1994 deal as part of a U.S. aid package, but Hill said that reactor "is simply not on the table" anymore. He has cited the North's conversion of a reactor at Yongbyon that supposedly was built for research into one that Washington says can make material for atomic bombs.