By Park Si-soo
South Korea and the United States are gearing up to resume the long-stalled multilateral talks aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program following the end of the mourning period for its longtime leader Kim Jong-il.
Kim’s death, announced last Monday, put the brakes on hard-earned progress to revive the dialogue, which involves the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan. The talks have been dormant since late 2008.
Against this backdrop, the U.S. expressed its wish for the North’s early return to the talks.
“We’re still looking for certain things from the North Koreans, and given that they’re in this mourning period, we’re going to have to let them emerge from that before we think we can move forward,” said Mark Toner, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, during a press briefing in Washington, Wednesday (local time).
This comment came at a time when Seoul’s top nuclear envoy Lim Sung-nam is visiting Washington to meet his U.S. counterpart Glyn Davies and discuss the issue.
“First, (we) shared the opinion with the U.S. that it is important to stably manage security on the Korean Peninsula after the death of Kim Jong-il,” Lim told reporters after emerging from talks lasting an hour and a half with Davies at the State Department. Davies did not speak to the media.
The South Korean envoy said the two sides agreed on the need to “resume the dialogue process under the right conditions.”
“Basically, as long as North Korea sends the right signals, I think the U.S. is adequately ready to hold talks again,” Lim said without elaborating about what the right conditions would entail.
The dictator’s funeral was held in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, on Wednesday and the communist regime organized a large-scale memorial service Thursday, marking the end of a 10-day mourning period and the beginning of the new leadership of Kim’s untested third son, Jung-un.
North Korea experts here said the regime is expected to soon send a signal that its new leader, in his late 20s, will run the destitute state for the time being with policies set by his predecessor. They cited the North’s return to denuclearization talks with the
U.S. only one month after its founder Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994 as a factor backing their prediction.
Kim’s death came just as Washington had made a small but meaningful breakthrough when Pyongyang reportedly agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment program in exchange for 240,000 tons of food aid during talks in Beijing, which has now been delayed indefinitely due to Kim’s death.
The hunger-stricken North has strived to hoard international aid to declare itself as a “strong and prosperous state” in 2012, the 100th anniversary of the birth of its founder Kim Il-sung.
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