North Korea is holding secret talks with Japan in China in what is believed to be their first contact since the death of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Japanese media reported, as nuclear envoys from South Korea and China met in Beijing yesterday.
Amid a series of diplomatic contacts, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak met China’s leadership in Beijing to discuss ways to preserve peace and stability on the divided peninsula as the North undergoes a delicate transition of power.
Hiroshi Nakai, a former Japanese state minister, met the North’s delegation on Monday for talks on the abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s, Japan’s Kyodo news agency quoted sources as saying.
The sides are also believed to have discussed terms for restarting intergovernmental negotiations, the Mainichi Shimbun reported.
Nakai’s office confirmed his trip to China. A government official declined to comment on the trip.
The meeting in China was scheduled to last through yesterday, but it could be shortened or extended depending on the North’s response, media reports said.
The Japanese government regards North Korea’s participation as a sign the North’s new leadership “may be interested in improving relations with Japan through progress in the abduction issue,” which keeps the two countries from normalizing diplomatic relations, one source said.
Japan and North Korea have not held intergovernmental talks since August 2008.
Separately, the South’s foreign ministry said a meeting was under way yesterday between the nuclear envoys from China and South Korea to discuss denuclearizing the North. The talks were held on the sidelines of Lee’s state visit.
Since Kim’s death last month, Beijing has called on regional powers to press ahead with efforts to restart aid-for-disarmament talks with Pyongyang.
On Monday, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) told Lee that the peninsula’s stability was paramount and nudged his counterpart to improve ties with the North.
Six-party talks involving the two Koreas, China, the US, Japan and Russia stalled about two years ago, but late last year efforts to get Pyongyang back to the negotiating table had appeared to be gaining momentum.
Just before Kim’s death last month, officials from the North and the US had held a positive round of talks in Beijing.
Media reports said at the time Pyongyang was poised to announce an agreement with Washington to suspend its uranium enrichment program and accept UN nuclear monitors in exchange for food aid.
Such moves by North Korea, which has twice tested nuclear devices, were preconditions set by South Korea and the US for resuming the six-party talks, which offer the North aid and diplomatic contacts in return for disabling its nuclear weapons program.
South Korea has said it is willing to hold more talks with the North to try to restart the six-party process.
Analysts say the impoverished North may seek to reach out for more talks in the hope of winning aid as the new leadership consolidates power, but doubt they will consider giving up its nuclear weapons program.
The state’s young and untested “great successor,” Kim Jong-un, appears to have made burnishing a hardline image his top priority as he seeks to win the backing of the powerful military, analysts say.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS