N. Korea Hints It Could Return to Nuclear Talks

North Korea’s mercurial leadership announced today that it would participate in international talks on its nuclear program if conditions are right, climbing back from an announcement earlier this month that it had atomic weapons and was not prepared to negotiate.

The conciliatory statement was attributed directly to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who was quoted by the country’s official news service as having told a Chinese envoy on Monday, “We will go to the negotiating table anytime if there are mature conditions.”

In tone more than substance, the latest statement appeared to directly contradict the incendiary Feb. 10 announcement, carried by the official news service and attributed to North Korea’s foreign minister.

The rapid reversal seemed to indicate that the envoy from China, North Korea’s only major ally, effectively rapped Kim on the knuckles for inflaming tensions in the region.

Other observers said North Korea was simply playing a game of good cop-bad cop, with the usually reclusive Kim emerging statesmanlike from the shadows to smooth over the crisis.

“This may be the first time that Kim Jong Il has overruled a Foreign Ministry statement,” said Scott Snyder, an analyst of North Korean public rhetoric and a senior associate of the Asia Foundation, a Washington think tank. “It does look now like North Korea will eventually return to the talks either when they feel they have no other choice or that there is something to be gained.”

The apparent softening of Kim’s position is likely to bring sighs of relief to the other parties in the six-nation negotiations, although at least publicly some diplomats shrugged it off.

“He ought to just come to the talks,” U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Christopher Hill was quoted by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency as saying this morning about Kim. Hill, who was recently tapped as a top negotiator with North Korea, added, “Nuclear weapons ... are an absolutely dead end. They will not lead [North Korea] to any future at all.”

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon also played down Kim’s announcement, telling Yonhap: “His remarks are not much different from what they have been saying [in the past].”

Although many analysts have long assumed that North Korea has at least a crude atomic weapon, Pyongyang’s Feb. 10 statement that it had begun producing nuclear arms triggered a furious round of crisis diplomacy. Hill and deputy South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min Soon were both in China last week to try to get the talks started again. The participants in the talks, which are aimed at getting Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program, are the United States, North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

Today’s announcement was, like most North Korean dispatches, couched in enough conditional rhetoric to make it difficult to decipher. But at least in principle, North Korea’s leader gave lip service to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

Kim was quoted as telling Wang Jiarui, the envoy of Chinese President Hu Jintao, that his country “had never opposed the six-party talks, but made every possible effort for their success.” He did not say under what conditions North Korea would return to the talks, saying that Pyongyang was hoping for “trustworthy sincerity” on the part of the United States.

North Korea has repeatedly demanded incentives to show up at the talks, among them energy assistance and food aid. The Bush administration has refused to budge on the demands. But China, which has considerable prestige attached to the talks it is hosting, is believed to have offered several sweeteners.