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Koreas to resume Cabinet-level talks

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE APRIL 21. The possibility of a dramatic forward movement on the Korean front was indicated today, even as Seoul and Pyongyang agreed to resume their stalled bilateral talks at the level of Cabinet Ministers.

These inter-Korean talks will be held in Pyongyang early next week in the wake of the prospective trilateral meeting involving the U.S. and North Korea as also China in Beijing. South Korea today affirmed, yet again, that the trilateral parleys on the North Korean nuclear issue would indeed take place as scheduled from April 23.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or the North) announced, on its part, that a top official of its National Defence Commission would be in Beijing for a few days from April 23. The DPRK's announcement is apparently related to the trilateral talks. According to South Korea, a DPRK military delegation had already arrived in Beijing today, probably in connection with the proposed trilateral talks on the nuclear arms issue.

The separate inter-Korean meeting, now on the cards, will be the 10th in a series and the first since the inauguration of a new President in South Korea last February. The current indication is that the three-day talks may begin in Pyongyang on April 27. The resumption of the inter-Korean dialogue, proposed by Seoul a few weeks ago, was recently held in abeyance following the North's reservations in the context of its running feud with the U.S., South Korea's military ally. It is, therefore, significant that a new inter-Korean meeting has now been scheduled as a sequel to the planned trilateral conference on the DPRK's nuclear issue.

On the nuclear talks, South Korea today indicated that the U.S. would not back away despite the DPRK's latest ambiguous statements about whether or not it had actually begun reprocessing 8000 spent fuel rods at a nuclear energy facility through a process that could yield weapons-grade plutonium.

Pyongyang today fired yet another political salvo against the U.S., charging Washington with making preparations for a second Korean war.

The North underlined that the Korean people on both sides of the divide should, therefore, recognise that the stark choice before them was either peaceful reunification or "national extermination" at the (alleged) hands of the U.S.

Interpreting the upcoming trilateral talks, South Korea said today that the U.S., which would attend the parleys, might not offer incentives to the DPRK to induce it to make a credible commitment to giving up its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

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