North Koreans Ignore U.S. Overture on Talks

SEOUL -- Despite an overture on talks from the Bush administration, North Korea showed no signs of reciprocating Wednesday, charging instead that the United States “is working hard to bring a holocaust of a nuclear war to the Korean nation.”

“The nuclear issue that renders the situation on the Korean peninsula strained is a product of the U.S. strategy to dominate the world,” North Korea’s official news agency said.

The Korean Central News Agency did not acknowledge Tuesday’s offer by the Bush administration to hold discussions with the North. Previously, the administration had demanded that the regime in Pyongyang dismantle its nuclear program as a condition for talks.

Although Washington’s apparent willingness to sit down with Pyongyang was welcomed by analysts in South Korea, they said the standoff over the North’s nuclear program is far from resolved.

“This will have little effect,” said Chon Hyun Joon, analyst with the Korea Institute for National Unification, a Seoul-sponsored think tank. “Although Washington’s wording is softer and it looks to be taking a step backward, nothing has changed.”

North Korea has won a modest victory in the American softening, analysts said. And it has succeeded in getting the attention it sought from the world. But it will probably try to escalate the situation in the days ahead, some added, including following through on its threatened withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

South Koreans, meanwhile, continued to take the standoff in stride. Shoppers crammed into Seoul’s Lotte Department Store for an after-New Year’s sale as cell phones rang and street merchants jockeyed for customers.

North Korea also took the opportunity Wednesday to accuse Washington of derailing inter-Korean cooperation and to assail Japan for what it said was unwarranted meddling.

Japan has sought, along with South Korea, China and Russia, to convince Pyongyang that it should relinquish its nuclear ambitions.

“The nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula arose because of the United States, and it has nothing to do with Japan,” said Pyongyang Radio, monitored in the South. “Japan has the effrontery to intervene in the nuclear matter and complicate the issue. It is none of their business.”

In a reversal of the anti-American demonstrations seen in South Korea in recent weeks, a small group of mostly older South Koreans demonstrated in favor of a continued U.S. military presence in the country. There are 37,000 U.S. troops based in South Korea.

“Long live the South Korea-U.S. solidarity!” a few hundred people chanted in front of the U.S. Air Force’s Osan Air Base, about 30 miles south of Seoul, according to the Associated Press.

The demonstrators criticized an anti-American backlash that has hit South Korea since the deaths of two teenage girls in a U.S. military accident in June.