By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
A North Korean official Friday dismissed media reports on the alleged health problems of the North's leader Kim Jong-il, calling them ``nonsense.''
Hyon Hak-bong, deputy chief of the U.S. affairs bureau at the North's Foreign Ministry, also said Pyongyang is making ``thorough preparations'' to rebuild the Yongbyon nuclear facility. He added that work to restore the plutonium-producing plant had already begun.
At the outset of inter-Korean talks on promised energy aid to Pyongyang under the six-party disarmament process, Hyon said that such reports have been spread by ``those who wish the worst for the North Korean regime.''
``Those reports are the mere trickery of bad people who do not want our country to fare well,'' Hyon was quoted by Yonhap news agency as saying at the truce village of Panmunjeom dividing the two Koreas.
Kim's absence last week at a parade marking the 60th anniversary of North Korea's founding fueled speculation over his health. Reports said Kim was recovering from a stroke. According to South Korean and Western intelligence authorities, Kim suffered a stroke in mid-August and underwent brain surgery.
Hyon, a delegate to the six-party talks aimed at denuclearizing the communist state, was attending the one-day meeting on energy aid to the North in accordance with an agreement made at the six-party talks last year.
The energy aid is part of the Feb. 13 disarmament-for-assistance pact signed by the six-party members ― the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia. Under the accord, the North was to receive one million tons of heavy fuel oil or its equivalent in aid and other political concessions, including its removal from the U.S. list of terrorism sponsoring states, in return for its declaration and disablement of its nuclear programs.
But the denuclearization efforts have stalled as Pyongyang has rejected accepting the establishment of a stringent protocol to verify its declaration on nuclear materials and programs made in June.
Pyongyang announced late last month that it had suspended the disablement process, blaming Washington for failing to remove the regime from a U.S. list of states sponsoring terrorism. The de-listing is crucial for the North since currently it is prevented from receiving foreign aid and loans. Pyongyang was put on the list in 1988 after its agents blew up a South Korean passenger plane, killing all 115 people aboard.
Hyon emphasized that the North submitted a list detailing its nuclear activity as agreed in the Oct. 3 agreement last year and completed about 90 percent of the disabling. He argued the United States has yet to provide promised political incentives, including removal from the blacklist, calling it a violation of the six-way agreement based on an action-for-action principle.
He said the Washington-proposed verification system was reminiscent of its pre-war activity in Iraq.
``The U.S. is seeking to visit (nuclear) sites at random without prior notice, collect samples, and analyze them with related equipment. It means coercive inspection,'' he said. `Look at Iraq. The U.S. ransacked Iraq, even its presidential palace, arguing weapons of mass destruction existed there based on false intelligence reports. After all, the U.S. invaded Iraq. It is a serious matter. The fundamental problem lies here.''
Hyon added the verification issue is a totally different matter from the issue of agreed U.S. political concessions.
South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Yu Myung-hwan didn't agree.
``This doesn't mean that the verification has to be completed before North Korea is de-listed, but that the principality and the modality of the verification method be established first,'' Yu said at a press conference organized by the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club.
Hwang Joon-kook, who represented the South Korean delegation at the Panmunjeom talks on energy aid, said the denuclearization process should not be backtracked.
``We expect the verification issue to make progress and the disabling and the energy aid to be implemented as planned,'' said Hwang, director general of the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade's North Korean nuclear issue bureau.