US Says 6-Way Talks Should Continue
2003-09-03
WASHINGTON - The United States expressed satisfaction Tuesday with last week's six-way talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, saying the multilateral process was valuable and should continue, Yonhap reported.
“The assessment of the talks in Beijing was that there was a useful consensus on the importance of the multilateral process and that the talks demonstrated why it's important to have everybody there,” Yonhap quoted State Department spokesman Richard Boucher as saying.
“Everybody heard what was said. No secrets, everybody heard the same thing and saw the same thing and it's all on the table,” he said.
Boucher said a strong consensus at the meeting that North Korea needs to end its nuclear program was also valuable.
“So I think we felt that the overall discussion was useful, if not immediately productive,” he said.
North Korea had dismissed the three-day meeting, involving itself, the U.S., China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, as “useless.” It said over the weekend that there is “no need for this kind of talks,” accusing the U.S. of seeking only to disarm it.
The North repeated its stance late Tuesday night, saying the Beijing meeting ended without progress because of Washington's refusal to halt its “hostile” policy toward it.
“The six-way talks were reduced to an armchair argument as they failed to achieve any initial results and their prospects remain unpredictable,” said the North Korea's Central News Agency in a report, monitored in Seoul.
The report accused the U.S. of raising at the meeting issues unrelated to the nuclear row such as conventional weapons and alleged human rights problems in the communist state.
Boucher said the six parties agreed at the discussions that there was value in continuing discussions in a multilateral setting, and the next step is for the Chinese to consult with the parties on dates for another round of talks.
“We would expect that process to be underway,” he said.
The spokesman declined to comment on Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi's accusations that the U.S. policy toward Pyongyang is a problem hampering efforts to resolve the nuclear issue.
Instead, Boucher stressed that all participants at the Beijing talks agreed that the main problem is North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
The nuclear dispute erupted last October when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to having a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 agreement with Washington.
Source : www.korea.net
