By Michael Ha
Staff Reporter
South Korea's chief nuclear negotiator Kim Sook offered his take on last week's shooting death of a South Korean tourist at a North Korean resort, Thursday, asserting that the incident at Mt. Geumgang and the six-party talks should be dealt with separately.
In a radio interview, he said he disagreed with the view that South Korea should use the ongoing six-party talks as a forum to ask the North about the incident and demand full cooperation for an investigation.
Some have even suggested that Seoul ask the United States to delay taking North Korea off its list of countries sponsoring terrorism unless Pyongyang fully cooperates on resolving the shooting incident.
Park Wang-ja, a housewife from Seoul, was the first-ever South Korean tourist to be killed by the North at the Mount Geumgang resort. There are lingering questions surrounding the incident that took place last Friday, but Pyongyang has been slow in offering help to resolve the issue.
Kim said, ``Getting the North off the list of states that sponsor terrorism and also offering economic and energy aid are the areas that will be discussed at the six-party talk level. The Mount Geumgang incident is something that is between the South and North. So I can't link these two issues. They are separate.''
He added, ``The North's denuclearization is still an important issue for South Korea. So that effort should not be influenced by other factors.''
The nuclear negotiator said that while the incident is a tragedy that must be resolved, President Lee Myung-bak's administration ``does not intend to let the shooting incident affect the overall inter-Korean relations. It would not be advisable to start making complicated connections to other issues.''
Some reports suggested, however, that if North Korea continues to refuse cooperation on resolving the tragic incident, antagonism toward it could start to build up in the South. That might make it difficult for the Lee administration to offer economic and energy aid to Pyongyang in conjunction with the North's denuclearization, according to a senior South Korean official quoted by the Yonhap News Agency.
Also potentially affecting the dynamics of the six-party talks are the rapidly chilling relations between South Korea and Japan over the Dokdo islets sovereignty issue. Japan's announcement this week that it will start using new middle school manuals asserting its claim to the islets beginning next year is igniting renewed diplomatic tension between the two countries.
The friction between Seoul and Tokyo could make it difficult for them to work together on the North's denuclearization issue, Yonhap reported. Until now, South Korea, the United States and Japan have been able to work closely together in the talks.
``The North's denuclearization and the Dokdo islets are two separate items, but if the diplomatic tension worsens between South Korea and Japan, that might make it awkward for the two sides to work together in the talks,'' a senior South Korean official said on the condition of anonymity.
Ending North Korea's nuclear programs will be discussed informally in Singapore next week at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting. The U.S. chief nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill is scheduled to attend the event for informal six-party nuclear talks with his counterparts.