China，S.Korea urge patience for N.Korea talks
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-02-18 01:38

BEIJING/SEOUL - China and South Korea urged patience with North Korea on Thursday, stressing their commitment to six-party talks on its nuclear program, as diplomats consulted in Beijing to try to get the process back on track.

North Korea last week dealt a blow to the complicated diplomatic effort to persuade it to abandon its atomic program, declaring for the first time that it had nuclear weapons and was withdrawing indefinitely from the talks.

South Korea's delegation, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, flew to Beijing on Thursday on a previously scheduled two-day visit. He met Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei.

"We can't expect to resolve this in a short period of time. We should take a long-term perspective, and we will resolve it in a calm manner," Song told reporters upon arrival in Beijing.

The recently named top U.S. nuclear negotiator for the Beijing talks, ambassador to South Korea Christopher Hill, also flew to Beijing for one day of meetings with Chinese officials.

He was upbeat on returning back to South Korea, saying he exchanged views with the Chinese on what each of the countries could do to have successful negotiations, Yonhap news agency reported.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said earlier Hill would meet Wu as well as Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing. He said Ning Fukui, China's special envoy for Korean nuclear issues, was also likely to attend the meetings.

The diplomatic flurry precedes a trip to North Korea on Feb. 19 by senior Chinese Communist party official Wang Jiarui -- an apparent attempt to salvage the talks, which also include long-time North Korean ally Russia and neighboring Japan.

Kong said China remained committed to the six-party process and pressuring North Korea was not the answer.

"We believe this kind of tactic will not create a resolution but instead raise tensions," he told a regular news briefing.

"Complication of the issue will complicate the safety and security of the region."

The six countries have met three times in Beijing. A fourth round of talks planned for September 2004 never materialized, with Pyongyang saying Washington must first drop its hostile policy toward the North.

South Korea's ambassador to China, Kim Ha-joong, said Beijing's influence on the North was far greater than believed.

Kong said the central issue was not China's leverage but distrust between North Korea, also called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and the United States.

"Both China and the ROK (South Korea) will take practical measures to resume the six-party talks, but the efforts of China and the ROK are not enough. We believe the most important are the efforts of the U.S. and DPRK," he said.

South Korea, which has maintained a two-track approach to the North through a bilateral engagement policy along with the multilateral nuclear diplomacy, is considering a policy change where it would more closely link its economic and agricultural aid to the North's progress on the nuclear issue.

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon told reporters on Wednesday that humanitarian aid would continue, but Seoul had yet to make a decision on a North Korean request for 500,000 tons of fertilizer.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun expressed concern about the North's nuclear declaration and boycott of the talks in his first public reaction to last week's statement by Pyongyang.

"We have a situation that could turn tense, or at times urgent, under certain circumstances," he told South Korean diplomats.

Both Japan and China also played down remarks by CIA Director Porter Goss on the threat of North Korea's ballistic missiles, with Hiroyuki Hosoda, Japan's top government spokesman, saying Tokyo did not believe Pyongyang would launch a missile soon.

Kong said China would not comment on "speculative remarks."

"Our position on the nuclear issue is we should take measures to strengthen mutual trust and create conditions for the renewal of six-party talks at an early date," he said.

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