U.S. President Barack Obama made the decision last week to send a top diplomat to North Korea for direct talks on returning the country to multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations, high-level administration sources told the Washington Post (see GSN, Nov. 9).
(Nov. 10) -
U.S. special envoy for North Korea Stephen Bosworth, shown in September, is expected to travel to Pyongyang for nuclear talks before January (Jo Yong-hak/Getty Images).
Obama is expected to to send special envoy Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang before January. The president set his plan after months of "intensive" consultations with East Asian nations, the newspaper reported yesterday.
Bosworth's negotiating trip would come after Obama's own visit to Asia this month. It would end a year that has seen Pyongyang challenge the young Obama administration's tolerance with several provocative missile launches and a second nuclear test.
Washington last spring supported enactment of heightened U.N. Security Council sanctions against the Stalinist state. Pyongyang subsequently took on a more conciliatory attitude, hinting that direct talks with the United States could lead to resumption of the stalled six-party process.
Administration officials said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's government agreed to Washington's demands for the bilateral discussions. Previous reports have indicated that the conditions included conducting no more than two direct meetings before resumption of the multilateral talks that also involve China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The last time such negotiations occurred was in December 2008.
"We have received the assurances that we sought from the North that they understood that this [returning to the 2005 multilateral framework] was the purpose," said an administration source. "I think we are realistic about what may come out of it. In the best of circumstances, they will simply agree to get back on the path they were on before the most recent provocations. But I don't think we are under any illusions that this will necessarily happen."
Former Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill led the last formal U.S. delegation to North Korea, in September 2008 (Scott Wilson, Washington Post, Nov. 10).
The official announcement of Bosworth's negotiating trip to Pyongyang is expected to occur in the next few days, Reuters reported.
"We'll have an announcement soon, next one to two days, regarding our decision whether to accept North Korea's invitation for bilateral talks," said a high-level Obama official (Andrew Quinn, Reuters I, Nov. 9).
North Korea only intends to rejoin the six-nation talks if it secures concessions of its own from direct meetings with the United States, Kyodo News reported.
North Korean diplomat Ri Kwang Il reportedly said that Pyongyang is seeking "Washington's withdrawal of a hostile policy against the North" and "removal of the U.S. nuclear threat" from the Korean Peninsula. Ri's remarks were reported by a source to have come from a conference in China yesterday (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, Nov. 9).
Meanwhile, South Korean and North Korean ships fired at each other today in the neighbors' first naval skirmish in seven years. Both ships sustained damage, Reuters reported.
The North has regularly used provocation or force as diplomatic leverage.
"North Korea is taking this aggressive stance to show they're not backing down on their security," said South Korean academic Yang Moo-jin.
South Korean military officials said that no one was injured or killed in the exchange that occurred after a North Korean patrol boat entered waters claimed by Seoul. The South Korean ship was reported to be riddled with gunfire and a North Korean vessel was said to have sustained significant damage.
As no peace treaty was signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953, the two nations are still technically at war (Herskovitz/Kim, Reuters II/Yahoo!News, Nov. 10).
The South Korean military was looking into whether the North's reported incursion was intentional. However, Prime Minister Chung Un-chan was said to have told lawmakers that it appears as if the skirmish was not provoked deliberately, the Associated Press reported.
Sea clashes between the two Koreas previously occurred in in 1999 and 2002. Though there were no South Korean deaths in the 1999 incident, six sailors were killed in the 2002 skirmish, according to the South's navy. It is not known whether the North incurred any casualties during the two incidents.
North Korean expert Baek Seung-joo speculated that the latest naval incident would not significantly alter relations between the two Koreas (Hyung Jin-kim, Associated Press I/Time, Nov. 9).
Elsewhere, France's new special envoy to Pyongyang met with the North's top diplomat today, AP reported. The nuclear standoff and the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two states were expected to be on the agenda.
Televised footage showed North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun welcoming Jack Lang and his team of French diplomats.
"Both sides exchanged views on the issue of bilateral relations and a series of matters of mutual concern," said Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (Associated Press II/Google News, Nov. 10).