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North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is believed to have repeated to a visiting Chinese official yesterday an earlier pledge to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Feb. 5).
The Xinhua News Agency reported that Kim told Chinese Communist Party official Wang Jiarui of Pyongyang's "persistent stance to realize the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."
Wang traveled to Pyongyang as part of Chinese efforts to draw the aspiring nuclear power back to six-nation negotiations intended to persuade the North to follow through on its pledges of denuclearization. The talks involve China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States and were last held in Beijing in December 2008.
Recent indications that Pyongyang is considering returning to negotiations are seen as proof that heightened U.N. Security Council sanctions, passed as punishment for last year's nuclear test and missile launches, are having an effect on the already extremely poor nation.
"The sincerity of relevant parties to resume the six-party talks is very important," Kim was reported to have said. No mention was made on whether North Korea intends to rejoin the stalled talks, but senior nuclear envoy Kim Kye Gwan today accompanied Wang to Beijing, according to the Yonhap News Agency.
North Korean studies expert Yang Moo-jin said the nuclear negotiator was expected to relay to China Kim's thoughts on the time line for restarting negotiations.
"North Korea desperately wants a breakthrough to revive its worsening economy," Yang said (Jun Kwanwoo, Agence France-Presse/Gazette, Feb. 9).
"Dispatching Kim Kye Gwan indicates that some sort of understanding is being worked out between China and North Korea on restarting the nuclear talks," Seoul-based analyst Cheong Seong-chang told Reuters.
The North Korean leader has a history of breaking nuclear promises, however, and not many experts think that he would ever terminate the nuclear weapons program that is promoted as the greatest accomplishment of his military-first regime (Herskovitz/Blanchard, Reuters, Feb. 9).
Chinese President Hu Jintao reportedly renewed an invitation through Wang for Kim Jong Il to travel to China, the Korea Herald reported.
Baek Seung-joo of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses said that Wang's trip to Pyongyang was likely arranged in order to provide North Korea with favorable circumstances for rejoining the six-party talks.
Analysts think that Pyongyang will receive or was at minimum assured a large economic aid package from Beijing for its return.
"The North can now come out to the talks and also gain financial aid, while China is able to flaunt its diplomatic authority over the North once more and highlight its role as the chair of the six-way talks," Baek said (Kim Ji-hyun, Korea Herald, Feb. 10).
South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan distanced himself yesterday from an earlier prediction that the disarmament negotiations would resume midway through this month, instead saying that the North's actions make it hard to guess when talks would take place again, Xinhua reported.
"The North is taking an active position when seeking its practical interests, but it is showing contradictory attitudes by designating no-sail zones and firing artillery shells into waters near the Northern Limit Line," Yu is reported to have told South Korean officials (Xinhua News Agency/People's Daily Online, Feb. 8).
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington would continue to try to persuade the Stalinist regime to rejoin the nuclear negotiations, Yonhap reported.
"Engagement has brought us a lot in the last year," Clinton said in an interview with CNN. "In North Korea, when we said that we were willing to work with North Korea if they were serious about returning to the six-party talks and about denuclearizing in an irreversible way, they basically did not respond in the first instance."
Clinton attributed Chinese and Russian support of the heightened U.N. sanctions against the North to the Obama administration's willingness to reach out to Pyongyang.
"A neighbor like China knew we were going the extra mile and all of a sudden said 'you're not just standing there hurling insults at them, you've said all right, fine we're willing to work with them.'" Clinton said (Hwang Doo-hyong, Yonhap News Agency, Feb. 7).
Also today, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's envoy, Lynn Pascoe, arrived in Pyongyang for discussions expected to address the nuclear standoff and other issues (Herskovitz/Blanchard, Reuters).