Posted on: Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Trilateral forum to discuss North Korea

By Zenaida Serrano Espanol
Advertiser Staff Writer

Concerns over North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear weapons will be among the topics of discussion when delegates from the United States, Japan and South Korea meet this week in Honolulu, a State Department official said yesterday.

The session, known as a Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group meeting, will allow delegates to discuss issues relating to the Korean peninsula and will be a forum for policy coordination, the official said from Washington, D.C.

"We have a number of views in common about the problems and about some of the solutions," said the official, who spoke on the condition that he would not be named, "and the purpose of these meetings is to ... reinforce the effectiveness of the actions we're taking individually."

The participating delegations will be led by James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-Hyuck of South Korea; and Mitoji Yabunaka, director general of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau of Japan.

The two-part session begins tomorrow with informal discussions among the three countries. The formal meeting will be held Friday.

The Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group meetings are held periodically, most recently in January in Washington.

Delegates at that meeting discussed whether to continue a $4.6 billion project to build two Western-developed "light-water" nuclear reactors in North Korea, a project meant to reward that nation for promising to freeze and eventually dismantle its suspected nuclear weapons program under a 1994 deal with Washington.