Seoul, Dec 29 (DPA) South Korean President Lee Myung Bak called Wednesday for North Korea’s nuclear programme to be dismantled next year through stalled six-nation talks, a news report said.
The move could indicate a shift in position by Seoul toward the negotiations, which also involve the US, Japan, China and Russia and which have been on hold since 2008.
‘(We) have no choice but to resolve the problem of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear programme diplomatically through the six-party talks,’ Lee was quoted as saying by South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
Lee said there was some urgency because the North had set 2012, the centenary of the birth of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, as the year it would become a ‘great, powerful and prosperous’ nation.
In light of this ominous objective, the international community ‘should certainly achieve the dismantlement of its nuclear programme next year’, Lee said.
The statement appeared more open to resuming the negotiations than an official quoted anonymously by Yonhap last week who said further talks would not be possible until Pyongyang rejoined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it abandoned in 2003.
Concerns have risen in recent weeks amid increasing tensions between North and South Korea and the emergence of a previously unknown, advanced uranium-enrichment facility at Yongbyon in the west of the country.
On Nov 23, North Korea shelled an island in disputed waters in the Yellow Sea, killing two South Korean soldiers and two civilians.
In the weeks since the shelling, South Korea has conducted several large-scale, live-fire exercises on land near the border with the north and at sea around the peninsula, including joint drills with the navy of its military ally the US.
Last week, Pyongyang told the visiting former UN ambassador for the US Bill Richardson that it would consider opening its doors to inspectors of the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
After leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty, North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009. It walked out of the six-nation talks, which aim to stop its nuclear weapons programme, in April 2009 over UN sanctions imposed on it.
