6-Party Talks to Restart in December

Washington and Beijing have agreed to hold six-party talks addressing the North Korean nuclear issue around the middle of December in China’s capital city.

The chief U.S. negotiator for the talks, Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, returned to Washington after meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Vice Minister Wu Dawei of China’s foreign affairs ministry, on Monday and consulted about the scheduling of the talks with Chinese foreign office officials the next day.

According to a diplomatic source, the mid-December six-party talks appear to have been Washington’s idea.

The two countries are said to have paid particular attention to fine-tuning the issue of Macao’s Banco Delta Asia (BDA), which had been discussed during the bilateral meeting in Beijing last October 31, so that different interpretations between the U.S. and North Korea would not arise.

While possibilities have been raised that Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, chief negotiator for North Korea, met with Hill after arriving in Beijing on Monday, the U.S. Department of State declared that there were no plans for such a meeting. It was also confirmed that the North Korean representative was not aboard the flight from Pyongyang, which arrived in Beijing early Tuesday.

In addition, responding to reports that China has canceled its freeze on BDA’s North Korean accounts in the cases of some “legitimate funds”, Vice President Lau of the Monetary Authority of Macau (MAM) said on Tuesday that “North Korean assets are still frozen,” and a Washington source also agreed that news of a partial lifting of the ban was not true.