By Park Song-wu
Staff Reporter


North Korea reportedly proposed via China that the six-party talks on its nuclear weapons programs be resumed on Sept. 13.

China has recently delivered Pyongyang’s proposal to South Korea, a newspaper in Seoul reported on Tuesday.

But officials at the Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry in Seoul said that South Korea did not receive any notice from China regarding the reopening date of the talks, which entered a recess on Aug. 7.

China, the host of the talks, is expected to announce a fixed date soon after coordinating the positions of other parties, officials in Seoul said.

The nuclear talks, if resumed on Tuesday, will coincide with inter-Korean minister-level talks that are scheduled to reopen in Pyongyang on Sept. 13-16.

The denuclearization talks, attended by the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan, were supposed to restart by the end of August.

But North Korea delayed the talks for two weeks, citing annual South Korea-U.S. military exercises and Washington’s appointment of a special envoy to monitor Pyongyang’s poor human rights record.

During the 13-day first-session talks in Beijing, the six nations were known to have agreed on five of the six major items in the principle document drafted by China on how to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

The single item that failed to produce an agreement was apparently subsection 2 of section 1, which was related to the scope of scrapping nuclear programs and the North’s right to retain the civilian use of nuclear facilities.

The U.S. has insisted that North Korea should not be allowed to have any nuclear programs, citing Pyongyang’s past history of violating international nuclear treaties including the 1994 accord.

But South Korea says Pyongyang should be given the right to have peaceful nuclear programs if it abandons all nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons programs and restores confidence by rejoining the non-proliferation treaty and abiding by the U.N.’s nuclear safeguard regulations.

North Korea expelled nuclear inspectors at the end of 2002 and quit the non-proliferation treaty in January 2003 when Washington accused Pyongyang of running a secret uranium-enrichment program. North Korea has denied the claim.

im@koreatimes.co.kr