North Korean official to visit U.S. this week

HONG KONG – A senior North Korean official will visit the United States this week to discuss the possible resumption of long-stalled international negotiations on ending Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday.

The news that diplomats could be close to reviving six-nation disarmament talks that broke off in 2008 comes after more than a year of animosity and high tension between the rival Koreas and raises hopes in a region on edge. Two attacks Seoul blames on Pyongyang last year killed 50 South Koreans and led to threats of war.

Clinton’s invitation for North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan to visit New York follows a crucial meeting Friday between nuclear negotiators from North and South Korea on the sidelines of a regional forum of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in Bali. It was the first such meeting since disarmament talks collapsed in 2008, and the envoys agreed to work toward the resumption of six-nation negotiations.

The recent diplomacy comes after more than a year of hard-line unity by Washington and Seoul since international investigators said a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship in March of last year, killing 46 sailors. The South demanded the North show regret for the warship sinking and an artillery attack on a front-line South Korean island that killed four in November.

North Korea denies a role in the sinking and says South Korea provoked the island shelling. While refusing to apologize, however, Pyongyang has repeatedly shown a willingness to return to the disarmament talks. The North is seen as needing a diplomatic breakthrough and outside food aid ahead of the 2012 centennial of the birth of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung.

“We are open to talks with North Korea, but we do not intend to reward the North just for returning to the table,” Clinton said in a statement announcing Kim Kye Gwan’s trip to the U.S. “We will not give them anything new for actions they have already agreed to take. And we have no appetite for pursuing protracted negotiations that will only lead us right back to where we have already been.”

Traveling with Clinton in Hong Kong, the top U.S. diplomat for Asia, Kurt Campbell, insisted that the talks were preliminary and aimed at laying out steps the United States must see before resuming the nuclear negotiations or having a “more fulsome interaction” with North Korea.

Campbell stressed that the United States would need to see much more from North Korea on improving ties with the South and rejected suggestions that U.S. is now on a “fast track” to returning to the talks. “We need to see many more indications from the North Koreans before we approach that point,” he told reporters.

During Kim’s trip, he will meet with a team of U.S. officials to explore his country’s commitment to returning to the international talks and taking concrete steps toward disarmament, Clinton said in the statement.