N. Korea Ties Peace Talks to Food Aid, Recognition, Sanctions

North Korea on Thursday demanded that South Korea and the United States increase food supplies before it would join them and China in talks toward a permanent peace treaty.

In an uncharacteristically blunt, on-the-record interview, North Korea’s deputy United Nations ambassador, Kim Chang Guk, said: “We are demanding” that the United States and South Korea talk to the North about increasing food supplies before four-party peace talks can start. The North also wants the United States and South Korea to ease trade sanctions and discuss formal recognition of the North as preconditions for the talks.

The United States and South Korea immediately rejected any preconditions for the peace talks aimed at reaching a permanent treaty to replace the fraying truce that ended the Korean War in 1953.

The talks were proposed last year by President Clinton and South Korean President Kim Young Sam. Negotiations in New York to prepare for the peace talks stalled last week.

“We are now in difficulties with food. If we start now with the four-party talks, the United States will press us, using food as a weapon,” said Kim, the North Korean envoy. “This food problem should be settled first.”

U.N. experts have said North Koreans are starving. The Communist nation needs to find more than 2 million tons of food to avert a massive famine during the next several months. The food shortage stems from two years of devastating floods and the cutoff of food subsidies from the now-defunct Soviet Union.

“We will not agree to any preconditions to start these talks,” U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said. But he called on nations worldwide to provide food aid to North Korea.

Since 1995, the United States has given or promised North Korea $33.4 million in aid, most of it food. About $25 million of that amount has been pledged since last month, but much more is needed.

In South Korea, an official in the Foreign Ministry rejected the North’s proposal as “nonsense.” But the Yonhap news agency in Seoul reported Thursday that South Korea had decided to send as much as 50,000 tons of corn.