YONHAP NEWS

(3rd LD) North Korea says it will boycott Japan in six-party talks

   SEOUL, Dec. 6 (Yonhap) -- North Korea said Saturday it will not dialogue with Japan in the upcoming six-party nuclear talks, as Tokyo refuses to provide its share of promised energy for Pyongyang.

   "We will neither treat Japan as a party to the talks nor deal with it even if it impudently appears in the conference room," a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry was quoted as saying by the North's Korean Central News Agency.

   "It is only Japan out of those parties that has not done anything to fulfill its commitment, and is still refusing to do so," the spokesman said.

   The warning came two days before a fresh round of the denuclearization talks was set to begin in Beijing.

   North Korea was promised 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil or the equivalent by its negotiating partners in the six-party talks in late 2007 in exchange for disabling its nuclear facilities. The talks also involve South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia
About half of the aid has been delivered.

   Japan has been reluctant to provide its share of the aid -- 200,000 tons of oil -- linking the assistance to North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens in the Cold War era.

   North Korea returned five Japanese abductees in 2002, soon after an unprecedented summit between the leaders of the two countries, but Japan claims several more abductees are still alive in North Korea. The North says they are dead.

   Bilateral relations have come almost to a standstill over the abduction issue.

   "It is the ulterior intention of Japan to bar the denuclearization of the peninsula from coming true and put spurs to its moves to turn itself into a military power under the pretext of the nuclear issue," the spokesman said.

   "Such a country has neither justification nor qualifications to participate in the talks. On the contrary, it only puts a hurdle in the way of achieving the common goal," he said.

   Top envoys of the six parties are expected to hold various meetings in Beijing ahead of formal negotiations. The key issue at the upcoming talks is whether North Korea will allow international inspectors to take samples from its nuclear sites. Pyongyang has refused the sampling, saying that was not part of an original deal, while Washington, Seoul and Tokyo say it is necessary for verification.

   North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan and U.S. chief nuclear envoy Christopher Hill met in Singapore to narrow differences ahead of the six-party talks.

   "The issue is not the verification, the issue is how to express it in a piece of paper ahead of time so there are no misunderstandings when the time comes," Hill said in Singapore on Thursday.

   Hill traveled to Seoul on Saturday ahead of next week's talks.

   The sporadic six-party talks began in 2003.

   hkim@yna.co.kr
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