Washington, September 12: The US has announced its readiness to hold direct talks with North Korea to persuade it to return to stalled negotiations on ending its nuclear program.
“If a bilateral discussion will lead us back to a six-party process, then why would we not do that?” US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters on Friday in Washington.
He noted, at the same time, that no decision has been made on when and where such meeting would be held. “We’ve made no decisions at this point, other than just to say we are prepared for a bilateral talk, if that will help advance the six-party process,” he said.
Crowley said consultations among President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other world leaders about a possible meeting between the US and North Korea could occur at the UN General Assembly this month, adding it was unlikely bilateral talks would take place prior to that time.
Earlier this week, the US special envoy on North Korea met with officials from Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo to discuss the multilateral talks. This is while, North Korea had announced earlier that it would only talk one-on-one with Washington.
Stephen Bosworth said in Japan that the United States is open to bilateral meetings with Pyongyang, but not as a substitute for the six-party disarmament talks.
“It’s a bi-lateral discussion that (is) hopefully…within the six-party context, and it’s designed to convince North Korea to come back to the six-party process and take affirmative steps towards de-nuclearisation,” Crowley said.
He refrained from calling the acceptance of North Korea’s offer of bi-lateral talks a “policy shift”, saying instead that it was a “short-term” measure to try and bring Pyongyang back to the negotiation table.
The recent developments come after North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il made a number of conciliatory gestures toward the South over the past few weeks.
The announcement also comes just weeks after former US president Bill Clinton and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il held a meeting in Pyongyang that secured the release of two US journalists who were serving prison sentences for entering the communist country illegally.
Tensions have risen on the Korean Peninsula since Pyongyang’s missile tests in May, which followed a US-sponsored condemnation of the North at the Security Council.
—–Agencies