By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Apr 23 2003 (IPS)

Even as doubts linger on whether Washington and Pyongyang have common ground for negotiations, a top U.S. official restarted on Wednesday talks with his North Korean counterpart aimed at resolving a nuclear standoff over the North’s suspected nuclear weapons programme.

The three days of talks at Diaoyutai State Guest House will focus mostly on procedural matters and will, at best, set the stage for more of the torturous negotiations that the two sides have undertaken on and off for over a decade.

The last round of negotiations was broken off in October, when Pyongyang admitted to secretly developing a uranium-enrichment programme for nuclear weapons.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who had confronted the North on a visit to Pyongyang last year with damning evidence, is meeting Li Gun, deputy director general of the American Affairs Bureau of North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

China, though widely seen as a little more than a host of the negotiators, remains an important broker in the new rounds of talks.

In Texas, U.S. President George W Bush was upbeat in saying that with the United States working in concert with China, South Korea and Japan, there is a ”good chance” that North Korea can be convinced to ”abandon her ambitions to develop nuclear arsenals”.

He praised the role played by China. ”The key thing on the North Korea agenda is that China is assuming a very important responsibility,” Bush said, adding there was broad support for a nuclear-free peninsula. ”Now that they’re engaged in the process, it makes it more likely that’s going to occur.”

China shifted its position in January after new Communist Party leader Hu Jintao became alarmed at possibilities that hawks in Washington might launch a pre-emptive strike against the North, and that a major war on China’s doorstep could seriously damage its trade and investment plans.

”This is now China’s number one foreign policy issue. Hu Jintao set up a special task force to rethink policy on North Korea, and is now putting pressure on them so they don’t do anything to provoke the Americans,” said a Beijing-based diplomat.

The U.S.-led forces’ speedy removal of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq raised even more fears in Beijing that the United States might target North Korea sooner than anyone expected.

A commentary released by the state-run Xinhua news agency fretted on how the fall of Baghdad had convinced Washington hawks that ” the United States should, even without authorisation from the world community, take pre-emptive strikes to tackle potential threats”.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen Richard Lugar, urged Bush to consider military strikes on North Korea if it proceeds to develop nuclear weapons.

”And if they tell us at those meetings they intend to build weapons, we’ve got to indicate upfront that is totally unsatisfying,” Lugar said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ programme.

Oblivious to these threats, North Korea is sticking to its usual diplomatic brinkmanship mixed with threats, and confusing statements – all of which makes diplomacy harder than ever.

”If enemies invade our inviolable sky, land and seas even an inch, we will destroy up the aggressors with merciless annihilating blows,” said the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

”As the U.S. imperialists’ attempt to stifle the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) has gone beyond the danger line, the process of peace and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula has been blocked and the danger of a nuclear war is increasing hour by hour,” it said on Tuesday.

”The U.S. imperialists should draw a lesson from its defeat in the past Korean war they started against the young DPRK,” it added, referring to the 1950-53 Korean War.

On Friday, it seemed that the talks might be off when the North said it was already ”successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase”. But a review of the translation of the statement led to re-interpretation Monday that the North is ready to reprocess its spent fuel rods but had yet to begin doing so.

Pyongyang also suddenly announced that after first cancelling the last Cabinet-level talks with South Korea, it was now ready to resume the talks on Apr. 27.

The Bush administration has so far failed to get a tough resolution condemning Pyongyang passed by the U.N Security Council. It says it wants to have multilateral talks with North Korea, to include Japan and South Korea.

Washington policymakers seem split on whether such talks, whatever form they take, can possibly go anywhere.

Analysts say Pyongyang’s Kim Jong-il nurtures unrealistic hopes that United States is preparing to offer it diplomatic recognition and large quantities of food, fuel and loans in exchange for a stop to its nuclear programme.

The United States insists that North Korea first abandons its two nuclear weapons programmes in a verifiable way before any offers of aid are forthcoming, and wants Pyongyang back in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it pulled out off earlier this year.

As Pyongyang has said, it has concluded from the Iraq war that only the possession of a nuclear arsenal or what it recently termed ”a powerful physical deterrent force” can guarantee its survival.

It is already believed to have generated enough plutonium to assemble several bombs from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and to have enough spent fuel rods to create four or five others.

By admitting to running a secret programme to enrich uranium in breach of treaties it signed first with South Korea in 1992 and then with the United States under the 1994 Agreed Framework, Pyongyang strengthened the hand of those in the Bush administration determined to avoid what they call another incoherent trade-off like that reached by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

But although the North cheated on its commitments, the United States also failed to honour promises including a firm security guarantee, the delivery of fuel oil and the construction of two nuclear power stations.

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