North Korea nuclear talks to resume on December 18 (Roundup)

Dec 11, 2006, 20:28 GMT

Beijing - The six-nation negotiations aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programme will resume on December 18 in Beijing, host nation China said on Monday.

'As a result of the consultations of the parties concerned, the second phase of the fifth round of the six-party talks on the Korean peninsular nuclear issue will be resumed in Beijing on December 18,' foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

The United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan and Russia are the other nations involved in the talks.

The meetings will be the first for the six countries since North Korea detonated its first nuclear device in October, which brought massive international condemnation of the regime in Pyongyang.

The six-party talks have been stalled for more than a year.

The new talks could extend for several days this month, with further sessions hoped for in January, US chief negotiator Christopher Hill told the Washington Post last week. US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington that Hill will arrive in Beijing on Saturday for preliminary discussions.

The meetings will seek agreement on the implementation of a 'statement of principles' that the six parties reached in September 2005 as a road map for negotiations.

'Our desire for this round ... is to build on the joint declaration from September 2005 and actually make progress in taking concrete actions and steps to implement that understanding in the joint declaration,' McCormack said.

The Japanese government welcomed the decision to resume the negotiations Monday, media reports said.

'We must push for progress, be it one step or two, toward North Korea's abolition of its nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programmes at the talks,' Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said.

China has hosted five rounds of talks over the past three years largely as a way to get the United States and North Korea to sit down together after Washington refused to hold direct bilateral talks with Pyongyang.

The Chinese government's official Xinhua news agency said local analysts were divided over the prospects for progress in the next round of talks.

'I find it hard for the forthcoming six-party talks to produce substantive progress,' the agency quoted Yang Bojiang, a researcher at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, as saying.

The main obstacle lies in the 'deep-rooted mistrust' between North Korea and the United States, Yang said.