KEY POINTS:
Foreign Minister Winston Peters will visit North Korea next week.
He leaves on Monday for the two-day visit, talks in Washington and the East Asia Summit (EAS) foreign ministers' meeting in Singapore.
Mr Peters said he had been invited to North Korea by his counterpart Pak Ui-Chun. He is also to meet Vice Premier Kim Young-Nam and the ministers of trade and agriculture.
He will be in North Korea on Thursday and Friday. "This visit is an opportunity to reinforce with North Korea the importance of fully declaring and dismantling its nuclear programmes and to express New Zealand's strong support for the Six Party Talks process," he said.
"It comes at a critical juncture. A team of US experts are currently working with North Korean scientists to disable core nuclear facilities."
Under an agreement reached by six nations - the two Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan - in February, North Korea pledged to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for the equivalent of one million tonnes of oil and political concessions.
Mr Peters said yesterday that New Zealand was ready to help North Korea's economic development once it had abandoned its plans to develop nuclear weapons. His visit there would be on the agenda when he met senior officials in the US Administration in Washington on November 19. Fiji and Myanmar were also likely topics.
In Singapore, for the EAS foreign ministers' meeting, issues include the leaders' climate change/energy declaration, and Myanmar. Mr Peters would cover his North Korean trip in meetings with foreign ministers on the side at the summit.
- NZPA
