Yonhap
3/3/2007
North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator arrived in New York Friday to attend his country’s first working group session with the United States on normalizing their diplomatic ties.
Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan, leading a seven-member entourage, avoided reporters at the airport and is believed to have headed directly to a hotel.
He was expected to stay in a hotel near the U.N. headquarters, a location which is easy to reach from the North Korean mission to the global body.
The senior official is scheduled to begin the two-day working group session here Monday with his U.S. counterpart, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, at the U.S. mission to the U.N. in Manhattan.
Kim is the highest-ranking North Korean official to come to the United States since Vice Marshal Jo Myung-rok went to Washington as his country’s special envoy in October 2000.
The vice foreign minister represents North Korea in the six-party talks over Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, which also involve South Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan. The envoys struck a deal on Feb. 13 under which Pyongyang would shut down its nuclear facilities and eventually disable them in phases. In return, the North would receive political and economic incentives provided by the other participating countries.
The agreement also established five working groups, including one on diplomatic normalization talks between the U.S. and North Korea.
Kim’s schedule has not been made public, but he is expected to attend a closed-door seminar hosted by the Korea Society, a New York-based nonprofit organization working for the promotion of friendship between the U.S. and South Korea, before the working group session begins.
The working group meeting is expected to focus on setting the agenda and schedules for future normalization talks and discussing a possible visit by Hill to North Korea.
The two sides are also expected to open discussions on removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorism-supporting nations, lifting sanctions and unfreezing North Korean assets in the U.S.
Kim began his week-long visit to the U.S. when he arrived in San Francisco early Thursday. He is known to have attended a closed-door seminar at Stanford University sponsored by various groups that have dialogue channels with Pyongyang. But the rest of Kim’s schedule in San Francisco was unavailable.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced that it had no choice but to suspend its operations in North Korea as of March 1 as the necessary conditions set out by the UNDP Executive Board on Jan. 25 have not been met.
“These conditions included adjusting the content of the current Country Program (2005-2006) and the proposed Country Program (2007-2009) for the DPRK to support sustainable human development objectives; ending all payments in hard currency to government, national partners, local staff and local vendors and discontinuing sub-contracting of national staff via government recruitment as of 1 March 2007,” said the U.N. agency on its web site.
But the UNDP noted that its position on operations in North Korea could be reconsidered if these circumstances change..
