North Korea is on track to fulfil its side of a breakthrough
disarmament accord by shutting down its main atomic facility
next month, the U.S. envoy to six-party talks on the North's
nuclear program said on Sunday.
Christopher Hill said he was confident that a new round of
the talks opening on Monday could move past a spat over North
Korea's frozen bank accounts and concentrate on pushing forward
the February 13 deal.
Under the terms of the accord reached at the talks grouping
the two Koreas, the United States, host China, Japan and Russia,
North Korea agreed to shut its Yongbyon reactor and readmit
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors within 60 days.
"I think we are on schedule for the shutdown of the facilities
and monitoring by the IAEA," U.S. chief negotiator Christopher
Hill told reporters.
Hill said the North Koreans now had a better understanding
of the U.S. position on Macau's Banco Delta Asia (BDA), which
the U.S. Treasury Department accused of harboring illegal North
Korean earnings.
"I think we have gotten past the BDA issue and that it
will not be an impediment to the six-party process," he
said.
The Treasury on Wednesday formally banned U.S. banks from doing
business with BDA, ending its inquiry and opening the way for
Macau to free North Korean accounts found to be above board.
Hill said he expected an announcement "very soon"
on the fate of some $24 million in frozen North Korean accounts,
and China's Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese State Councilor
Tang Jiaxuan as saying North Korea and the United States had
worked out a resolution.
But other delegates said the issue could remain thorny.
"North Korea insisted that the United States had not done
what it should on BDA," said a Japanese diplomat, who attended
working group talks on Sunday.
"North Korea and the other five parties were so far apart
that no concrete achievement has been made on the denuclearization
of the Korean peninsula," the diplomat said.
Arriving in Beijing on Saturday, the North Korean chief envoy
Kim Kye-gwan said his country, which stunned the world by conducting
its first nuclear test last October, would not shut Yongbyon
until the accounts were unfrozen.
Hill was to talk with the U.S. Treasury's deputy assistant
secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, Daniel
Glaser, late on Sunday, after a trip by Glaser to Macau.
HIGHLY ENRICHED URANIUM
Hill gave working group meetings on denuclearization over the
weekend a "positive assessment" and said the six-party
talks would discuss progress in all five of the working groups
established under the February 13 agreement.
"I think everyone was positive about the fact that Mr
ElBaradei was able to visit and the DPRK spokesman also made
very clear that they have begun their tasks for the purpose
of denuclearization," Hill said referring to the IAEA chief.
But sensitive issues remain, including that of highly enriched
uranium, which Hill said the six countries would set up a committee
to discuss.
U.S. allegations about the program in 2002 caused a previous
nuclear agreement to unravel.
Since reaching the February deal, the United States has acknowledged
gaps in its intelligence about whether the North had the technology
and material needed to produce highly enriched uranium for weapons.
Underscoring the deep distrust between the United States and
North Korea, the North's state-run Rodong Sinmun paper hit out
at planned military exercises between Washington and Seoul,
saying they were aimed at poisoning the atmosphere of the talks.
"The DPRK is ready for both war and talks," it said
in a commentary, referring to the North's formal name, the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea.
(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard, Jack Kim, Teruaki Ueno
and Reuters Television)
