Talks Fail as 2 Koreas Hit Another Impasse

After a secretive, last-minute meeting to revive broken-down talks failed, South and North Korean negotiators headed home Saturday, accusing each other of creating the impasse.

North Korea requested the low-profile meeting between the two sides’ top negotiators only hours after South Korea declared Friday that it was pulling out of the Beijing talks because of the North’s intransigence.

But the 90-minute session Saturday morning played out as inconclusively as the three previous rounds in the drawn-out negotiations.

Meanwhile, a former United Nations diplomat said in Beijing that North Korean officials had informed him of plans to test a ballistic missile--another sign of the increasing tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Yasushi Akashi, a former U.N. undersecretary-general, said during a news conference that an official in the North Korean Foreign Ministry had informed him of the missile test plans during Akashi’s visit last week to the hermit nation.

At Saturday’s meeting, South Korean Vice Unification Minister Yang Young Shik and North Korea’s Pak Yong Su reiterated the same positions expressed previously, a South Korean Embassy spokesman said.

The Beijing negotiations were the highest-level talks between the Communist North and capitalist South in 14 months. Now as then, talks broke down over the issue of reuniting 10 million people separated from relatives in the 54-year partition of the Korean peninsula.

After Saturday’s meeting failed, Yang accused the Communist regime in Pyongyang anew of not negotiating in good faith, thereby violating an agreement last month to discuss family reunions in exchange for Seoul’s delivery of 200,000 tons of fertilizer to North Korea.

“We greatly regret that North Korea has not implemented the June 3 agreement,” Yang said in a statement. “We expect the northern side to respond to the dialogue as agreed.”

Pak accused the South of not meeting its obligation on the fertilizer deliveries.

“They violated the agreement and stuck to only one problem,” Pak told Japanese and Korean reporters.

Half the promised fertilizer was shipped before the talks began. But Yang said Friday that Seoul would send no more until North Korea began earnest discussions of the reunion issue.

North Korea, which is in its fourth year of widespread food shortages and whose economy is in ruins, is in desperate need of fertilizer to boost its summer crops.

During the talks, Pak--who had threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire”--and his aides behaved provocatively, walking out of two sessions and once refusing to shake hands with Yang. Instead of discussing family reunions, Yang said, the North repeatedly focused on the sinking of a North Korean gunboat by Seoul during a skirmish last month in the Yellow Sea.

“We greatly deplore that the northern side used the excuse of the . . . incident which it provoked,” Yang said in his statement.