KEY POINTS:
BEIJING - Negotiations aimed at coaxing North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons ended without progress on Friday, with Washington and Pyongyang blaming each other for betraying expectations and no date set for fresh talks.
The six parties - the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China - agreed only to "reconvene at the earliest opportunity", according to a statement from the chief Chinese negotiator Wu Dawei.
Envoys had sought to flesh out a September 2005 agreement that promised North Korea aid and security guarantees in return for nuclear disarmament, but Pyongyang was preoccupied only with getting US financial curbs against it lifted.
Chief US negotiator Christopher Hill said that, after hopeful informal contacts, it became clear that his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, lacked the backing to formally deal on anything but the financial standoff.
"Alas, by the end of the week, it was clear the DPRK ... team did not have the instructions that they needed to go forward and to agree to the proposals," Hill told reporters. "They were not prepared to engage on the actual agreement."
The DPRK, or Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is the North's formal name.
Emboldened by his country's first nuclear test on October 9, the North Korean chief negotiator did not rule out future tests.
"The US is now jointly undertaking dialogue and pressure, carrots and sticks," he told a news briefing. "And we are standing against them with dialogue and shields. The shield is to improve our deterrent."
Hill said another nuclear test by Pyongyang would do "severe damage" to diplomacy and to the isolated communist state.
Throughout the five days of talks, envoys said, North Korea dwelt on little more than the freeze on its accounts at Macau's Banco Delta Asia, which Washington alleges abetted Pyongyang's money-laundering and dollar counterfeiting.
North Korea said the financial curbs - announced shortly after the September 2005 breakthrough - showed Washington had negotiated in bad faith.
"The US has been unable to come to a decision to lift its sanctions and give up its hostile policy against us," Kim said.
Hill said that he had gone to Beijing with the "understanding" that North Korea would not press the banking dispute in the nuclear talks, leaving the financial wrangling to separate negotiations which did not promise an instant fix.
The veteran US negotiator said his expectations about the bank dispute also rested on unavoidable diplomatic ambiguity. "Things are always a little more opaque than one would like."
A separate US Treasury team met North Korean officials in Beijing this week for two days of talks on the dispute. They reached no deal, but those talks are expected to continue in New York in January.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reaffirmed support for UN sanctions imposed following the nuclear test and said the dialogue progress must continue.
"The international community will increase its pressure on North Korea," he told reporters.
In Geneva, United Nations aid agencies warned on Friday of an impending food crisis in North Korea where summer flooding destroyed crops and worsened a chronic shortage of grain.
"The situation is indeed critical," Simon Pluess, spokesman of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), told a news briefing.
North Korea has yet to recover from famine in the 1990s that experts say killed about 2.5 million people, or 10 per cent of the population.
Hill said he was unsure when the six-party negotiations could resume, but expected them "in weeks, not months." Washington remained committed to the talks that Beijing has hosted since 2003, he added.
But further failure to make progress would call into question those multilateral talks, Japan's chief envoy said.
"I think various opinions will emerge on the credibility of the six-party talks," Kenichiro Sasae told reporters.
- REUTERS
