NORTH KOREA:North Korea, under its secretive leader Kim Jong-il, is on track to fulfil its side of a disarmament accord by shutting down its main atomic reactor next month, the US envoy to six-party talks on the North's nuclear programme said yesterday.
Christopher Hill said he was confident that a new round of the talks opening today could move past a spat over N Korea's frozen bank accounts and concentrate on pushing forward the February 13th deal.
Under the terms of the accord reached at the talks - which included 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 (IAEA) inspectors within 60 days.
"I think we are on schedule for the shutdown of the facilities and monitoring by the IAEA," US chief negotiator Christopher Hill told reporters.
Mr Hill said the North Koreans now had a better understanding of the US position on Macau's Banco Delta Asia (BDA), which the US treasury department accused of harbouring 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 last Wednesday banned US 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.
Mr Hill said he expected an announcement "very soon" on the fate of some $24 million (€18 million) in frozen North Korean accounts, and China's Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese state councillor Tang Jiaxuan as saying N Korea and the US 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.
"North Korea and the other five parties were so far apart that no concrete achievement has been made on the denuclearisation 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.
Mr Hill was to talk with the US treasury's deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, Daniel Glaser, late last night, after a trip by Mr Glaser to Macau.
Mr Hill gave working group meetings on denuclearisation 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 13th agreement.
But sensitive issues remain, including that of highly enriched uranium, which the US chief negotiator said the six countries would set up a committee to discuss. US allegations about the programme in 2002 caused a previous agreement to unravel.
Since reaching the February deal, the US 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 distrust between the US and North Korea, the North's state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper was heavily critical of planned military exercises between Washington and Seoul. - ( Reuters)