By Kim Tae-gyu
North Korea is unlikely to return to the six-party talks aimed at stopping the communist regime’s nuclear ambitions despite promising to engage in dialogue with its only ally and benefactor, China.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s special envoy to China, Vice Marshall Choe Ryong-hae, said that the country would accept an offer from China to begin dialogue during his visit this week.
“If North Korea expressed its willingness to return to the six-party talks, China would have announced it without hesitation. In the sense, I don’t think that the North said so,” said Chang Yong-seok, an analyst at the Institute of Peace and Unification Studies affiliated with Seoul National University.
“Pyongyang seems to have announced that it would not, in principle, reject the offer to talk. In fact, the North never rebuffed the proposal to talk. It just refused the proposal to have six-party talks.”
Choe visited China this Wednesday on a fence-mending mission with China because the two countries’ relationship has been strained since the North’s nuclear test in February.
However, if the North attempts to return to the six-party talks, Cheong Wa Dae said it would welcome such a move. Yet, it added that the chances of restarting the six-party talks in the near future remain slim.
“We always welcome the North’s return to six-party talks. But we think the possibility of the country doing so is relatively small because it would be about ending their nuclear program,” a Cheong Wa Dae official said.
He said that Seoul will not respond to Choe’s remarks of reopening dialogue with China because it is not a proposal to Seoul.
The six-party talks were initially designed to find a peaceful way of dealing with security concerns on the Korean Peninsula because the North’s nuclear threats have caused concern among neighboring countries.
Additional to the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia took part in the talks to discuss the aftermath of North Korea’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003.
Several rounds of discussions among the six countries from 2003 through 2007 produced the substantive result of making the North pledge to shut down its nuclear facilities in exchange for fuel aid and a rapid normalization of its diplomatic relations with the U.S. and Japan.
But the North pulled out of the six-party talks in early 2009 in response to condemnation by the U.S. of a failed satellite launch. The country subsequently resumed its nuclear program.