Meeting in N.Y. With N. Korea Yields Little

U.S. officials and North Korean representatives held a meeting in New York last week but discussed no new diplomatic initiatives to resolve the crisis over Pyongyang’s quest for nuclear weapons, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The U.S. government’s delay in acknowledging the meeting led some arms control specialists to speculate that it might have involved a sensitive new initiative to break the impasse in international negotiations.

But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Washington had requested the meeting, held May 13, to clarify its position on how to restart long-stalled talks involving the United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China.

“It [was] not in any way a negotiation, it’s just a way to make sure they’re clear on what our position is,” Boucher told reporters at a routine briefing.

The Bush administration’s statement on the New York meeting came as South Korea failed in a series of meetings to persuade North Korea to rejoin the talks. Representatives of the estranged nations met in the North Korean border city of Kaesong.

The Kaesong meetings reestablished dialogue between the two neighbors after a 10-month hiatus. The two sides agreed that a senior South Korean delegation would travel to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, to celebrate the five-year anniversary on June 15 of a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and then-South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

The North Koreans promised to travel south the following week for meetings among Cabinet-level officials in Seoul. South Korea also pledged to send 200,000 tons of fertilizer to North Korea.

The amount of fertilizer is a fraction of what the regime could have received. South Korean officials told the North that it could expect a massive aid package if the regime agreed to dismantle its nuclear program.

The South Koreans did not specify what the package would include, but one official described it to reporters here as a “Marshall plan” that would pay for rebuilding the North’s derelict infrastructure and other economic aid.

Still, the offer elicited little response.

“North Korea did not pay much attention to that proposal,” said Lee Duk Haeng, a senior official of the South Korean Unification Ministry, which is responsible for dealings with North Korea. “They didn’t want the talks to be focused on the nuclear issue.”

The Kaesong meetings, originally scheduled to end Tuesday, were held over to Thursday with the goal of South Korea at least eliciting a statement from the North expressing the hope that diplomacy could resolve their standoff over nuclear weapons. The North Koreans agreed only to a vague statement expressing their desire to keep peace on the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. request for a direct meeting with North Korea last week followed comments this month by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the United States had “no intention to attack or invade North Korea.” She also stressed the potential benefits to Pyongyang if it agreed to give up its nuclear quest.

The administration has consistently rejected Pyongang’s demands to negotiate the nuclear issue directly with Washington and instead has called for a resumption of the six-party talks. North Korea has refused to return to those negotiations, which were last held in June 2004.

America’s main allies in the talks, South Korea and Japan, have also pushed the administration to show greater flexibility in order to move toward a negotiated settlement of the issue.

Because of this, the meeting in New York initially was seen by some analysts as a possible concession by the United States.

Participating in the meeting were Joseph DeTrani, the United States’ special envoy to the six-party talks, and James Foster, director of the State Department’s Office of Korean Affairs.

North Korea was represented by its United Nations ambassador, Park Gil Yon, and his deputy, Han Song Ryol.

Marshall reported from Washington and Demick from Seoul.