Officials play down U.S.-North meeting

Representatives at the six-nation summit had differing opinions on progress.
BEIJING (AP) -- Fresh from a landmark meeting with North Korean officials, the United States said it would hold no formal one-on-one talks with the communist nation during a six-way summit to resolve a dispute over the North's nuclear program.
"There will not be any separate formal bilateral meetings with the North Koreans," a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Beijing said today, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The head of the American delegation, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, met Wednesday with his North Korean counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong Il, after the opening session of the three-day meeting, which also involves China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.
But U.S. officials played down the importance of their informal half-hour meeting. "There are not separate, individual, bilateral discussions going on," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said in Washington.
After four months of official silence, Washington and Pyongyang traded the cold shoulder for careful conversation Wednesday when they huddled on the sidelines of the six-nation summit convened to work through a stalemate over the North's nuclear program.
The summit, which ends Friday, came together after months of political maneuvering when China -- political ally of the North and economic partner of the United States -- agreed to play host.
Situation so far
The delegations broke for lunch with little indication of whether progress had been made. "Each of the six countries made their positions known," Chung Woo-jin, a spokesman for the South Korean delegation, said without elaborating.
He said the six-way talks would not reconvene this afternoon, although some delegations met separately on the sidelines.
Tensions and hostilities have been escalating since October, when Pyongyang acknowledged -- to Kelly himself -- that it restarted a nuclear program it had supposedly shut down. The United States has demanded that North Korea stop the program immediately, while the impoverished North has refused to budge without guarantees of security and economic aid.
Both sides would benefit if a sturdy channel of communication were re-established -- even if it didn't lead to an immediate resolution of the nuclear dispute. Mere agreement this week to keep talking regularly would constitute some degree of success.
Differing assessments
A South Korean official said he perceived a willingness to be flexible by both the United States and North Korea.
"The U.S. side made comments about easing North Korea's security concerns," Wie Sung-rak, director-general of the South Korean Foreign Ministry's North American Affairs Bureau, said Wednesday night. "From what North Koreans said during the meeting, we could read that North Korea is willing to resolve the nuclear issue through dialogue."
But Alexander Losyukov, the Russian deputy foreign minister and head of his country's delegation, was less optimistic.
"The sides have advanced a number of preliminary conditions which block the development of the talks," Losyukov told the ITAR-Tass news agency without elaborating. He said North Korea declared that it wishes to be nuclear-free but expressed concern about "menaces from the U.S."
The six-party talks are a continuation of discussions from April, when U.S., Chinese and North Korean officials met in Beijing. The North's government had long demanded one-on-one talks with the United States but dropped its objections to the multilateral arrangement after Beijing agreed to host it.
U.S. officials say they think North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons, and experts think it could produce five to six more in a few months.
Kidnapped Japanese
In a separate meeting today, Japan urged North Korea to let the children of five Japanese citizens kidnapped and spirited to North Korea years ago join their parents, who were permitted last year to return to their homeland.
North Korea, however, reiterated its assertion that Japan had broken a promise by not returning the five abductees to Pyongyang, according to a statement by the Japanese government.
The kidnapping of Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s by North Korea -- to train its spies to assume false identities -- has stalled efforts by the two countries to set up diplomatic relations and halted Japan's food aid to impoverished North Korea.
Japan also brought up the nuclear arms issue in its bilateral meeting with North Korea this afternoon.
Delegates from the North and South also got together after the talks ended Wednesday, meeting for a half-hour, said Shin Bong-kil, spokesman for the South Korean delegation.
The Koreas were divided in 1945 and share a heavily fortified border. The 1950-53 Korean War ended without a peace treaty.