North Korea's position on its nuclear program remains the same, said a U.S. expert who ended a visit to Pyongyang yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 23).
Korea Economic Institute President Charles Pritchard, along with two other North Korea experts, spent four days in the isolated country. The three visitors met for six hours with Pyongyang's No. 2 nuclear negotiator, Ri Gun, and also spent time with other North Korean officials, Kyodo News reported.
The discussions addressed the moribund negotiations aimed at shuttering the North's nuclear programs and the regime's relationship with Washington. In all of those conversations, Pritchard told reporters in Beijing yesterday, the visitors detected no differences in the North's position on the nuclear impasse.
The Obama administration has accepted a longstanding North Korean request for bilateral talks with the United States. U.S. special envoy Stephen Bosworth is set to visit the North on Dec. 8 for a brief round of discussions on returning the isolated country to the stalled six-nation talks that also include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
"We carried no messages to the North Koreans from the U.S. government. We did not receive any specific messages [from Pyongyang]," said Pritchard, who plans on briefing Washington officials on his trip.
He said his small group was not able to meet with top nuclear envoy Kim Kye Gwan, who was said to be recovering from a cold. Pritchard said he did not have any idea who Bosworth would meet with when he traveled to North Korea (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, Nov. 24).
Meanwhile, a leading Russian lawmaker said yesterday that North Korea had no other choice than to return to multilateral negotiations, Agence France-Presse reported.
Pyongyang last participated in multilateral talks in December 2008. In the last year, the North has carried out a second nuclear test and declared that it has resumed reprocessing plutonium, which had been suspended under a denuclearization agreement.
"There is no real alternative to the negotiations," said Sergei Mironov, president of the upper house of parliament, according to ITAR-Tass.
He said that "only the negotiation process, guarantees and multilateral involvement can lead to the successful political settlement of the nuclear issue" and that "Russia cannot look calmly on when [the North is] building and testing a nuclear weapon" (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, Nov. 24).