United States and North Korea Hold First “Exploratory Talks”
U.S.-North Korean Meeting
United States and North Korea held their first round of “exploratory talks” at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, where U.S. Representative for North Korea Stephen Bosworth and the North Korean foreign minister Kim Kye Gwan met on Thursday.
The two officials held a four-and-a-half hour meeting, which Kim described as “constructive” and “interesting,” while Bosworth described it as “serious” and “businesslike.”
The next meeting between the two officials is scheduled to happen on Friday, and, according to a U.S. State Department statement, it aims at assessing whether North Korea is prepared for a six-nation talks about its nuclear program.
U.S. State Department invoked in the statement the 2005 Joint Statement of the Six-Party Talks by which North Korea agreed to a peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, to abandoning all nuclear production program and to returning to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. They also agreed by the same document to allow inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The discussions about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula began to stall in 2009, when North Korea conducted a nuclear bomb test, which drew further economic sanctions from the United States.
Tension escalated in 2010 around the joint military drills conducted by the United States and South Korea in the Peninsula, leading to the sinking of a South Korean military vessel in March and to the shelling of a South Korean island in the summer, both acts producing casualties.
U.S.-North Korean Talks
Before the talks were engaged on Thursday, North Korean leaders spoke on national television about the necessity to agree about a peace treaty between North Korea and the United States of America, which would end the war that started in the 1950s, and was officially terminated by a mere armistice.
The Communist leaders maintained that no serious talks about denuclearization can be engaged unless the state of war between the two countries is formally over. They said that the peace treaty should come before the denuclearization talks.
They also maintained that while open to the idea of denuclearization of the peninsula, the process should be paralleled by a similar action of the United States, thus leading to the denuclearization of both parties involved.
The six-nation talks format includes the two Koreas, The United States of America, China, Russia and Japan. Except for Russia and Japan, the other four countries are engaged in drafting a peace treaty as requested by the North Korean regime.
South Korea is also engaged in a process of reunification of the two Koreas, to that effect the president Lee Myong-bak developing a multi-step project, supported financially by the government, that would eventually lead to both ending the Communist regime in the North and the starvation that comes with it, and the nuclear threat that hangs over the heads of all the people of the Korean Peninsula.
