By Park Song-wu
Staff Reporter




No government officials on Thursday dared to officially confirm even whether Christopher Hill, top U.S. envoy to the six-party denuclearization talks, held a meeting with his North Korean counterpart Kim Gye-gwan in Beijing on Wednesday.
Given that Hill’s brief stopover in Beijing on his way to the U.S. _ or rather the second visit in a week on his tour of Asia _ was made at a critical juncture, officials in Seoul, Beijing and Washington might have agreed to remain silent until they could pin down a date to resume the disarmament talks.

Hill unexpectedly returned to Beijing on the same day when North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was heading back to Pyongyang after allegedly consulting with China’s President Hu Jintao in Beijing on how to deal with Washington’s financial sanctions against Pyongyang.

It is highly plausible that Hill had flown back to Washington with a proposal, containing ``creative’’ ideas of the two Communist allies and South Korea on ways to resolve what Kim Jong-il called the ``difficulties’’ that have allegedly blocked Pyongyang’s return to the negotiation table.

A tip-off to the proposal came a little earlier when Song Min-soon, Seoul’s top diplomat to the six-party talks, told reporters on Jan. 11, right after his return to Seoul from a one-day trip to Beijing, that he exchanged ``creative opinions’’ with his Chinese counterpart Wu Dawei.

Another Seoul official, who is deeply involved in the talks, went a step further, saying figuratively that ``Song made dough together with Wu and now we have to wait and see whether it will become bread or nothing.’’

The metaphor could mean the ball is now in Washington’s court.

Currently, the best way to lift sanctions is considered to be an apology from Pyongyang as it seems almost certain that the U.S. has evidence to prove North Korea’s alleged counterfeiting of U.S. dollars and laundering of the ``supernotes’’ in a bank in Macau, a Chinese territory.

There is a similar precedent from 2002 when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang in mid-September and Kim surprisingly admitted North Korean agents had kidnapped a number of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.

Kim Jong-il apologized, blaming rascal elements in the security services, who he said had acted upon their own initiatives, and promised no repetition.

The same style of apology could possibly be made by Pyongyang to get rid of the U.S. financial sanctions, and the question is whether Washington will accept it or not.

At the State Department in Washington, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Ban Ki-moon, who was visiting the U.S. to attend the inaugural ``strategic consultations’’ with his U.S. counterpart Condoleezza Rice on Thursday, was expected to play a mediator’s role between Washington and Pyongyang to find a breakthrough in the nuclear deadlock.

Will Ban’s efforts pay off? The answer could come next week at the earliest or after U.S. President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech on Jan. 31.

North Korea declared its boycott of the six-party talks in November, arguing that Washington’s imposition of sanctions is a strategy to stifle the Pyongyang regime. But the U.S. said it is a ``legal enforcement issue’’ that is unrelated to the nuclear talks.

The latest round of the talks in November ended with no progress and the six participating countries _ the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan _ promised to reconvene ``at the earliest possible date.’’

im@koreatimes.co.kr