North Korea Talks to Resume in Beijing

BEIJING, Feb. 7 ― The long-stalled six-way talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program will resume here Thursday amid tentative signs that a breakthrough may be in the offing, in a diplomatic process that seemed shattered four months ago when North Korea tested its first nuclear bomb.

Christopher R. Hill, the chief American negotiator for the talks, arrived in Beijing today and held separate meetings with Chinese and Russian diplomats. Mr. Hill has been shuttling around the world, meeting with envoys from North Korea and other countries, in an effort to get the talks moving.

“We all share ambitions for this round,” Mr. Hill said to reporters as he arrived at his hotel this evening. “We want to make a good start, a good step forward.”

Mr. Hill is essentially trying to return the process to where it stood in September 2005, when North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program in return for security, economic and energy benefits, in a broad draft accord.

Even then, analysts said that the unresolved differences between the United States and North Korea made a final agreement far from a sure thing. Talks on how to implement the agreement broke down after a few weeks, and North Korea walked away. Then it defied international warnings by testing a nuclear weapon last October.

At a short public appearance at the Beijing airport earlier today, Mr. Hill was careful to minimize expectations for the talks this week. “I want to emphasize that the real success is when we complete the September ’05 agreement,” he said. “Not just when we start the ’05 agreement, but when we finish it. So we’re not going to finish that this week ― we’ll just maybe take a good first step.”

The six-nation talks ― which include China, Russia, Japan and South Korea as well as the United States and North Korea ― were first held more than three years ago, and have since met in several rounds in Beijing. But they have yielded little tangible progress. This week’s round is to be held at a government guest house in Beijing, and is likely to continue into the weekend.

North Korea has seemed in recent weeks to be signaling a greater willingness to bargain and to be specific about what it wants. Last weekend, two American envoys returning from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang said the communist regime there was prepared to disable its main nuclear reactor in Yongbyon in exchange for assured supplies of electricity and oil from its neighbors.

North Korea also told the envoys that it wanted Washington to lift financial sanctions against it, and to remove it from a list of states regarded as sponsors of terrorism.

The two envoys ― Joel Wit, who was involved in North Korean issues as a Clinton administration official, and David Albright, an expert on nuclear arms, first described the North Korean position to the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, last Saturday as they passed through the Beijing airport.

Mr. Hill, who is assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, has spent much of 2007 traveling in hopes of building a consensus for a deal. Last month, he and the top North Korean envoy, Kim Kye-gwan, met directly in Berlin, the first between high-level American and North Korean officials to be held outside Beijing. Mr. Hill described those talks as “substantive,” and has expressed cautious optimism throughout his travels.

From the North Korean perspective, one sticking point is how much ground Washington is willing to give on its financial sanctions. In late 2005, Washington accused Banco Delta Asia, a financial institution in the Chinese territory of Macau, of laundering counterfeit dollars printed in North Korea as a way to finance drug trafficking and other illegal activities. The United States then froze $24 million in North Korean assets and effectively shut North Korea out of the international financial system.

The Pyongyang regime was incensed by the sanctions and has demanded the release the $24 million. Last week, an American treasury official met in Beijing for two days with North Korean diplomats to discuss the Banco Delta Asia situation.

Brian Bridges, a professor of politics at Ling An University in Hong Kong, said that last week’s Beijing meeting appeared to end without a breakthrough, though he noted some speculation that the United States may agree to a compromise that would declare a portion of the frozen Banco Delta Asia money “clean.” Mr. Bridges said he thought that this week’s talks may, at best, set up working groups for discussing individual issues, like denuclearization or the financial sanctions.

But he said that achieving more sweeping progress was unlikely. “I’m not too optimistic,” he said. “I don’t think there is going to be a major breakthrough.”

North Korea Talks to Resume in Beijing - New York Times