KEY POINTS:
By Paul Eckert
NEW YORK - US and North Korean officials have started talks aimed at eventually normalizing diplomatic ties as part of an agreement under which Pyongyang has pledged to scrap its nuclear arms programmes in exchange for aid.
The talks in New York mark the highest-level such meeting on US soil since communist North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il sent a top envoy to Washington in 2000 in an abortive effort to improve relations.
North Korean envoy Kim Kye-gwan and his US counterpart, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, began discussing ways to resolve problems between two countries that have been bitter foes since the 1950-53 Korean War.
President George W. Bush in 2002 labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil". And antipathy to the United States has been a core element of Pyongyang's identity for five decades.
Despite the historic enmity, Kim Kye-gwan's meeting with US nuclear and Korea experts earlier on Monday showed a "sea change in tone and substance" from recent exchanges, said nuclear expert Jim Walsh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who participated.
"Both sides are talking differently and treating each other differently," Walsh said of the unofficial meeting, attended by eight North Koreans and 15 Americans, including Victor Cha, Asia chief of the US National Security Council.
The brief officials session on Monday local time was to be followed by a working dinner and Tuesday's talks were expected to run all day, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. He played down expectations of any breakthrough.
"I would expect that it ... would take some time in order for that process to be completed," he told reporters. "It would be a matter of building up trust, it would be a matter of performance and today is just an initial discussion."
"Underlying all of this, North Korea can realize a different kind of relationship with the rest of the world. The pathway is open to them," he said. "There is also another pathway of isolation ... if they do not perform."
Bilateral issues to be discussed include Washington's designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism and US trade sanctions against the North under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the State Department said.
Washington will seek Pyongyang's assurances that it is committed to following through on an agreement to shut down within 60 days its main nuclear facility and allow inspectors in return for 50,000 tons of fuel oil.
The New York meeting is part of the first stage in implementing the February 13 deal reached in Beijing by the Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China after three years of talks punctuated by North Korean's October nuclear test.
Further steps to fully "disable" North Korea's nuclear weapons programme will gain the impoverished state another 950,000 tons of oil or other forms of aid of equivalent value.
Before the next round of six-party nuclear talks on March 19, North Korea is set to hold discussions with Japan in Hanoi and separate meetings on energy aid, the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and regional security.
Wendy Sherman, a former US negotiator with North Korea, said Kim Kye-gwan's meeting at the nonprofit Korea Society with experts that included former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, was "positive, cordial, open and fairly expansive".
"That said, at the end of the day this comes down to the negotiations that will go on," she added.
- REUTERS
