North Korea blasts U.S. proposal for talks
By Paul Shin
Associated Press
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea rejected as "pie in the sky" U.S. offers of talks and possible aid in exchange for abandoning its nuclear ambitions, accusing Washington yesterday of staging a "deceptive drama" to mislead world opinion.
Associated Press
Keeping up a stream of anti-American invective — even as it agreed to more high-level meetings with South Korea next week — Pyongyang declared it would accept no U.S. offer of dialogue with conditions attached.
A South Korean soldier surveys the demilitarized zone. Unusual activity at the DMZ is likely unrelated to the current standoff, a U.S. official said.
Washington's "loudmouthed supply of energy and food aid are like a pie in the sky, as they are possible only after the DPRK is totally disarmed," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a report by the country's foreign news outlet, KCNA.
DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who is visiting Asia to seek support in getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program, said today in Beijing that resolving the issue would be a "very slow process."
"We're not about minute solutions to very complicated problems," Kelly said before leaving Beijing for Singapore. "And we're going to have to talk and work together and communicate with other people including with North Korea very, very clearly."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday the United States had not heard any official word from Pyongyang.
"That's an additional unfortunate comment that North Korea has made," he said of the North's reported dismissal of a possible aid deal.
After assuring South Korean officials in Seoul that Washington will stick to diplomacy to resolve the North's nuclear dispute, Kelly met Chinese officials in Beijing to seek their help.
As North Korea's only major ally, China is in a strong position to influence its communist neighbor. China traditionally supports a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry's Web site said that Vice Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told Kelly yesterday that "China is willing to coordinate with various parties to push for a peaceful resolution to the nuclear issue at an early date."
Kelly earlier this week had extended one of Washington's tentative aid offers if North Korea verifiably disarms.
South Korea pushed forward its own efforts to defuse the tension by setting up Cabinet-level talks with North Korea in Seoul. The talks, Jan. 21-24, are the first opportunity for South Korea to directly raise its concerns over the nuclear issue.
U.S., British and French officials meeting yesterday in London decided that the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors should convene as a next step in the dispute with North Korea, a U.S. official said.
Britain's Foreign Office said the officials met to discuss North Korea as part of regular contacts.
Despite the nuclear tension, the Korean border remained calm yesterday, South Korean Defense Ministry officials said. But U.S. military officials reported increased North Korean patrols in one area of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas.
Lt. Col. Matthew Margotta, who commands a combined battalion of U.S. and South Korean soldiers, said the North Korean moves were "not alarming, just unusual." He added that the North Koreans have also occupied a guard tower that had not been used in years.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday at a Washington briefing that the movements probably were not linked to the nuclear standoff.
"The incidents in the DMZ, I think, are related to other issues, perhaps, that have to do with authorities in the DMZ and so forth and do not have to do with the current issue with their nuclear programs," Myers said.
North Korea's rejection of U.S. dialogue offers was among the daily diatribes it issues through the state-run media.
Reports from the agency also rejected international concern over its nuclear programs, saying that the United States started nuclear proliferation and was now trying to shift the blame to North Korea.
"In 1945, the U.S. produced three A-bombs and tested one of them in its mainland and dropped the other two on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inflicting nuclear holocaust on the Japanese for the first time in human history," the dispatch said.
The North also has tried to drive a wedge between the South and the United States, the South's key ally, and yesterday called for a joint Korean struggle against "U.S. imperialists."
"If the North and South join forces and take a joint stand, we can protect the nation's dignity and safety against U.S. arrogance," Pyongyang Radio, said.
