US AND PYONGYANG AT ODDS OVER NUCLEAR ‘PROGRESS’
▶ North Korea accuses US of applying pressure to disarm unilaterally
North Korea said yesterday that talks with the United States delegation led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were “regrettable” and accused Washington of trying to put pressure on the country to abandon its nuclear weapons unilaterally.
The North’s statement came hours after Mr Pompeo wrapped up two days of talks with North Korean officials but without meeting leader Kim Jong-un.
Before leaving Pyongyang, Mr Pompeo told reporters that his conversations with Mr Kim’s senior aide, Kim Yong-chol, had been “productive”, were conducted “in good faith” and that “a great deal of progress” had been made in some areas.
He stressed that “there’s still more work to be done” in other areas, much of which would be taken up by working groups the two sides have set up to deal with specific issues.
However, the North provided a much harsher assessment of the talks, saying that the US betrayed the spirit of last month’s summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Mr Kim by making “one-sided and robber-like” demands on “CVID” – the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation of North Korea. It said the outcome of the follow-up talks was “very concerning” because it has led to a “dangerous phase that might rattle our willingness for denuclearisation that had been firm”.
“We had expected that the US side would offer constructive measures that would help build trust based on the spirit of the leaders’ summit ... we were also thinking about providing reciprocal measures,” a spokesman of the foreign ministry said, as reported by the official Korean Central News Agency.
“However, the attitude and stance the United States showed in the first high-level meeting was no doubt regrettable,” the spokesman said.
Despite claims of progress, Mr Pompeo could point to no concrete result from the talks, aside from an agreement for the two sides to meet around Thursday in the border village Panmunjom to discuss returning the remains of US soldiers from the Korean War.
Mr Pompeo said negotiators discussed the idea of Pyongyang making a full declaration of its weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and setting a timeline for giving them up.
“These are complicated issues but we made progress on almost all of the central issues,” Mr Pompeo said at the airport before leaving Pyongyang after his third visit to North Korea. “We had productive, good-faith negotiations.”
He said that North Korea, in the “many hours of talks” at a guesthouse outside Pyongyang, had reiterated its commitment to denuclearisation.
It also confirmed that it intended to destroy a missile-engine testing facility and the two sides discussed the “modalities” of what that would look like, the secretary of state said.
Critics and analysts who study North Korea have argued its commitment to the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”, as spelt out in a joint declaration from the June 12 Singapore summit, does not go as far as other promises to give up nuclear weapons that North Korea previously made, and then reneged on, many times in the past.
In recent days, intelligence reports have shown that North Korea is continuing work at a key rocket-engine facility. The US has also stopped using the catchphrase “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearisation” that it had insisted on as a condition for any relief from crippling sanctions.
But US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Mr Pompeo had been “very firm” in insisting North Korea fulfills its commitment to “complete denuclearisation”.
Mr Pompeo is under pressure to deliver a concrete plan after Mr Trump and Mr Kim signed a vague one-and-a-half-page document without a timetable for dismantling the North’s arsenal.