NORTH KOREA: A meeting at which a South Korean envoy was expected to deliver a letter to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, failed to take place in Pyongyang yesterday. No explanation was offered for the enigmatic Kim's failure to appear.
Presidential envoy Lim Dong-won had planned to hand Kim Jong-il a letter from South Korea's outgoing president, Kim Dae-jung, aimed at defusing the nuclear crisis.
But a Seoul official said that midnight of Lim's second day in the North Korean capital passed without the meeting starting. The prospects of Lim seeing Kim Jong-il today were unclear, the official said, adding that it was possible that he might delay his planned return to Seoul.
Lim held a second round of talks with ruling party official Kim Yong-sun, whom he met on Monday in a meeting which Seoul described as "serious" and Pyongyang said was "overflowing with compatriotic feelings and mutual understanding".
The North's willingness to receive an envoy from the South to discuss the crisis was evidence of a marked shift by Pyongyang, which has insisted that the impasse can only be broken by direct talks with the United States. However, a North Korean statement carried by the Russian news agency Interfax yesterday repeated Pyongyang's rejection of multilateral negotiations to resolve the dispute.
"We consistently stand against all and any attempt to internationalise the nuclear question on the Korean peninsula, and . . . we will not participate in multilateral talks in any way," the North Korean Foreign Ministry statement said.
The crisis was sparked in October, when the United States, which has bracketed North Korea with Iraq and Iran in an "axis of evil", said that Pyongyang had admitted developing nuclear arms.
North Korea later expelled UN nuclear inspectors, removed seals from a mothballed reactor and pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.