North Korea wants sanctions dropped and the United States to free its overseas bank accounts as preconditions for dismantling its nuclear programme, Yonhap news agency said on Wednesday, terms likely to become a sticking point in negotiations.
North Korean envoy Kim Kye-gwan made the demands in meetings in Beijing on Tuesday with representatives of other countries in six-party talks on ending the North’s nuclear weapons programme, the South Korean news agency said, citing a source in Beijing.
North Korea agreed to return to the talks — which involve South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States — after its first ever nuclear test last month triggered United Nations-backed sanctions.
US officials have said they want North Korea, without condition, to stand by last year’s agreement in which it said it was committed ”to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programmes”. In return, the other nations held out economic, political and security incentives.
Pyongyang agreed to return to the talks after Washington said it was willing to address its concerns about financial restrictions, tightened in September 2005 when US regulators named a Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia, as a conduit for illicit North Korean cash from currency counterfeiting and drug trafficking.
But the North has also said it would be unthinkable for it to return to talks until the United States ended the financial restrictions.
”Kim called on the US at a Tuesday meeting to re-open its frozen accounts at Banco Delta Asia, a lifting of the UN resolution against the North and the end of individual sanctions as preconditions for its dismantling its nuclear weapons,” Yonhap quoted the source as saying.
US General BB Bell, the head of US forces in South Korea, said on Wednesday that the North was building nuclear weapons for political blackmail.
”I’m not worried about their nukes militarily,” Bell said. ”I see this as a political instrument much more so than I see it as a military instrument.
”The North has built nuclear weapons as an instrument of political policy in order to blackmail nations in the area.”
In an address to business leaders in South Korea, Bell said he did not think the government in Pyongyang would collapse soon but that Pyongyang hoped their nuclear ambitions may cause fissures in the US-South Korean military alliance.
Kim and US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill are scheduled to meet for a second day of talks in Beijing on Wednesday, a senior US State Department official said.
”The primary purpose of this particular meeting [on Tuesday] was to talk to the North Koreans about … what North Korea needs to do,” said the official who declined to be identified.
”The operating premise here is good faith actions in return for good faith [actions].”
The Beijing talks are designed to lay the groundwork for a fresh round of six-party talks which Hill has said he hopes can be held in December. – Reuters