By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
South Korea will deliver a message of protest during an Asian security forum that opened Monday in Singapore against North Korea's recent killing of a South Korean tourist at the Mount Geumgang resort, an official said.
North Korea's nuclear weapons program will dominate the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), an annual security dialogue that brings together the foreign ministers of 27 countries, the official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.
ARF consists of a 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations and 16 other countries, including the two Koreas and the United States, and the European Union.
``We will raise the issue of the tourist killing as an official discussion topic at the forum,'' the official said. ``It's natural to raise the issue given the forum is the venue for talks over regional security affairs.''
The United States, Australia, Singapore and some other nations are in support of addressing the incident during the talks, so there is a possibility that the issue could be included in the chairman's declaration at the end of the meeting, he said.
North Korea has yet to respond to South Korea's call for holding bilateral ministerial talks over the death, he added.
Seoul has called on Pyongyang to start a joint investigation into the killing of Park Wang-ja, a 53-year-old Seoul resident who was gunned down earlier this month after allegedly entering a restricted area near Mount Geumgang.
The communist state has so far refused to offer assistance or cooperate in the investigation.
Top diplomats from six countries involved in multilateral talks aimed at scrapping North Korea's nuclear program will hold an informal meeting today.
It is the first time that the foreign ministers from the six-party members ― the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia ― have met since August 2003, when the six-party framework was launched.
The six foreign ministers are expected to discuss ways to transform the six-party mechanism into a permanent regional security framework, as well as to dismantle North Korea's nuclear programs completely, diplomatic sources said.
Reports said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to meet her North Korean counterpart, Pak Ui-chan, on the sidelines of the forum.
At the latest six-way talks in Beijing, North Korea, which tested a nuclear weapon on October 2006, agreed to completely disable its main nuclear facilities by the end of October and to allow thorough site inspections to verify that all necessary steps had been taken.
Other items high on the agenda will be spiraling food prices, guidelines for joint disaster relief and human rights.