U.S. special envoy Stephen Bosworth's trip to North Korea next month is expected to last only one and a half days, the Yonhap News Agency reported (see GSN, Nov. 19).
In South Korea yesterday, U.S. President Barack Obama said Bosworth would visit Pyongyang on Dec. 8. The administration hopes the visit will move the North toward rejoining six-nation talks on its nuclear program. The regime abandoned the talks last spring; it subsequently conducted its second nuclear test and announced resumption of plutonium reprocessing.
Bosworth is expected to be accompanied by a four- or five-person delegation from multiple agencies, U.S. State Department officials said. Washington's representative for the six-nation talks, Sung Kim, is expected to be among the visitors.
"Our goal here is, of course, the resumption of the six-party talks and to secure North Korea's reaffirmation of the September 2005 joint agreement," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. He added: "The complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula ... will be the focus of Ambassador Bosworth's trip to Pyongyang."
Kelly said Bosworth would proceed from Pyongyang to meetings with other partners in the six-nation talks "to give them a readout of his talks with North Korean officials." The other participants are China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has reportedly said that his country would consider rejoining the multilateral negotiations based on the success of direct discussions with the United States (Hwang Doo-hyong, Yonhap News Agency, Nov. 19).
Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada was wary today on the prospects for progress in the upcoming bilateral talks, Agence France Presse reported
Tokyo "would like to hope that some kind of progress will be made," Okada said. "But looking at talks with North Korea up until now, it's not as if there have been clear improvements. So while we hope for progress, we should not have excessive expectations" (Agence France-Presse I/Spacewar.com, Nov. 20).
Meanwhile, a U.N. report has found that North Korean companies companies have identified ways to circumvent sanctions such as asset freezes imposed due to their association with the state's nuclear and missile operations, Kyodo News reported yesterday.
Pyongyang continues to take part in activities banned under U.N. resolutions and "is seeking to mask those transactions in order to circumvent the Security Council measures," states the report. Discovery of a "substantial cargo of arms and related military equipment" appeared to bear out that suspicion.
With the report's findings in mind, the U.N. Security Council began talks yesterday on how to better enforce sanctions against Pyongyang (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, Nov. 19).
Elsewhere, China's defense minister, Liang Guanglie, is expected to travel to North Korea shortly, AFP reported.
While the China News Service provided no reason for the visit, it would come shortly before Bosworth's own trip to the North and it during a period that has seen Beijing move to prod North Korea back to disarmament talks (Agence France-Presse II/Google News, Nov. 20).