NKorea nuclear talks head to make-or-break day

Beijing, Dec 22: Six-party talks aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme headed into a final day today, with officials holding out little hope of reaching a deal on first steps towards that goal.

Negotiators said they wanted to focus on a September 2005 agreement that offered the North aid and security guarantees in return for disarmament, but Pyongyang remained preoccupied with getting US financial curbs against it lifted.

''I am not here to talk about financial issues,'' chief US envoy Christopher Hill told reporters late yesterday.

''I'm here to talk about getting the DPRK out of the business of producing weapons of mass destruction,'' he said, referring to the North's full name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

In Washington, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed the US view that the financial issues and the nuclear talks should be kept apart, and said the North Koreans had themselves asked for a separate working group on the matter.

''We should not be diverted, somehow, by an issue that is clearly in another lane and is clearly being dealt with in a way that the North Koreans themselves asked that it be dealt with,'' Rice said at a news conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay.

''We cannot be diverted from what we need to do in the six-party talks, which is to have the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,'' she added.

The talks, which group the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, are the first in more than a year and are taking place in the shadow of the North's first nuclear test on October 9.

As they went into a fifth day today, it looked like they could break up with no agreement.

MORE MEETINGS

Hill said he expected to hold more meetings with the North Korean delegation, but added that regardless of the outcome he planned to leave tomorrow to be home in time for Christmas.

''We are trying as hard as we can to get this done,'' he said.

''But we are not prepared for a situation where somehow we pretend that they're doing things and they pretend to disarm and we pretend to believe them. This has to be real,'' he said.

Earlier in the week Hill had hinted at progress on a deal on concrete steps North Korea would take toward scrapping its nuclear arsenal, which would probably include allowing back international inspectors Pyongyang expelled in 2002.

But envoys say the North has since refused to talk about anything but financial curbs which the US brought against it more than a year ago, alleging that Pyongyang was involved in money-laundering and counterfeiting.

The curbs centre on frozen accounts at Macau's Banco Delta Asia (BDA), which Washington says was a ''willing pawn'' in the North's illicit activities.

''They have had strict instructions from their capital that they cannot engage officially on the subject of six-party talks until they have the BDA issue resolved, and I made very clear, I am not a BDA negotiator,'' Hill said.

He said he was not ready even to set a date for a future round of the tortuous negotiations, but held out a glimmer of hope that a last-minute deal could be brokered.

''These rounds, you have to judge them by the end,'' he said.

''It's hard to judge them in the middle.''

REUTERS