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WASHINGTON-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday ruled out meeting with a North Korean official during her visit to Asia next week, saying such talks would "not be useful at this time."Rice was scheduled to visit Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo next week as part of six-country negotiations aimed at scrapping North Korea's nuclear weapons."I don't plan to, I just don't think it's something useful at this time or that it's warranted," she told reporters when asked if she would meet with a North Korean delegate during her stop in Beijing.She said that Christopher Hill, her top nuclear envoy, has had "those contacts and he'll continue to have them." Hill met in China this past week with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan."I think everybody knows what needs to happen here, and North Korea is quite aware of what it needs to do. And I do look forward to talking to the Chinese, the Japanese, the South Koreans about how we can move this forward," she said.She said much progress has been achieved in disabling North Korea's nuclear facilities but they still had to be dismantled and a full accounting of nuclear activities was still needed."But I don't see any purpose at this point in meeting with North Koreans," Rice said.North Korea, which staged its first nuclear test in October 2006, later agreed to return to six-party negotiations grouping the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.A landmark deal reached on February 13 last year offers the North a million tons of fuel oil, normalized ties with the United States and Japan and a formal peace treaty, if it scraps all nuclear programs and material.In the current phase the North agreed to disable its atomic plants and fully declare all nuclear programs by the end of last year. But it missed the deadline amid a dispute with the United States over the declaration.Pyongyang says it submitted a list in November.Rice also played down the diplomatic benefits that the New York Philharmonic would have when he holds a privately arranged concert next week in the North Korean capital Pyongyang."From my point of view, it's a good thing that the Philharmonic is going," Rice said.But she added, "I don't think we should get carried away with what listening to Dvorak is going to do in North Korea," she said.Nonetheless she put the concert in a broader context in which North Korea would increasingly interact and open up to the outside world, which is envisioned as the six-party talks move forward."And so, one can always hope that engagement with the outside world, no matter how limited, starts to have an effect," Rice said.
She said the United States has "always been willing to give food aid" to the impoverished North Korean people and has tried to reach out to them through Radio Asia, a Voice of America institution."So there's a full-scale program here. It's not just about the nuclear program, although, obviously, that's a danger to the Korean Peninsula and something that we are trying to deal with,"Rice said.
As in the days of Noah....
