North Korea talks fail to break impasse

Host China said in a chairman’s statement at the end of four days of talks that the delegates had agreed to convene the next meeting as soon as possible, but offered few other details.

“We were not able to get an agreed verification protocol,” chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said at the Beijing airport before leaving China, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Hill added that the six parties would continue to try to set North Korea’s verification commitments in writing, according to Japan’s Kyodo news agency.

However, Japan’s top nuclear negotiator, Akitaka Saiki, said the prospect for setting up the next round of six-party talks appeared “quite difficult”, Kyodo said.

Having coaxed North Korea to partly disable its Yongbyon nuclear complex this year in a disarmament-for-aid deal, envoys from five states had been asking the wary and impoverished North to accept a protocol for checking its nuclear declaration.

U.S. President George W. Bush, who gives way to President-elect Barack Obama in January, had hoped an agreement on verification would have opened the way to dismantling North Korea’s nuclear arms capacity.

The six-party talks, begun in 2003, bring together North and South Korea, host China, the United States, Japan and Russia. They took on fresh urgency after Pyongyang held its first nuclear test explosion in October 2006, but have made fitful progress.

During his first term in office, Bush denounced North Korea as part of an “axis of evil”, alongside Iran and Iraq, but later he strongly backed Hill’s efforts to strike a disarmament deal with the North.

North Korea has refused proposals to allow inspectors to take nuclear samples to test its declaration, said South Korea’s envoy Kim Sook, Kyodo news agency reported.

But analysts do not think North Korea, starved of energy and money, plans to quit the talks, at least for now, because it craves the aid coming to it through the nuclear deal, especially after cutting ties with South Korea, once a big benefactor.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack did not rule out putting North Korea back on a list of states accused of sponsoring terrorism.

“I suppose these things are always possible,” he told a news briefing. “...it’s based on behaviour. And we’ll see what behaviour North Korea engages in.”

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