US opens the door for better relations with North Korea

WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Saturday, Oct 6, 2007. Yahoo! News.

With a private tour of Washington for North Korean diplomats and a possible Pyongyang concert by the prestigious New York Philharmonic, the United States is beginning to warm up to the communist regime after more than five decades of a diplomatic freeze.

But US officials insist a full blossoming of relations shut down since the 1950-53 Korean War won't happen until North Korea fully abides by its agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

Within weeks of Pyongyang's first steps to shut down its key Yongbyon reactor under an agreement sealed in six-nation talks in February, the change is evident.

Aside from the commencement of huge shipments of fuel oil promised by South Korea, Russia, the United States, China and Japan as part of the agreement, Pyongyang has scored some softer benefits.

A group of 16 North Korean UN diplomats and their families, normally confined to within a 40-kilometer (25-mile) radius from New York City, got an unprecedented secret tour of Washington last month, seeing the White House and Lincoln Memorial and driving past the Pentagon, the Chicago Tribune reported on its website Friday.

The Tribune said the North Koreans came to Washington with the approval of Christopher Hill, the senior US diplomat in charge of negotiating the North Korean nuclear disarmament deal under the six-party framework.

Hill was also credited by the New York Philharmonic for opening the door to talks on the United States' premier orchestra holding a concert in Pyongyang next February, at the tail end of its tour of China.

Top officials from the orchestra left the United States for North Korea on Thursday, the New York Times reported, to hold talks on the concert.

"It would be kind of extraordinary for us to play there," orchestra president Zarin Mehta told the Times.

"If this venture helps in furthering what's been going on in the last couple of weeks in terms of the normalizing of relationships, that would become a wonderful thing for the world."

But US officials on Thursday stressed that more formal improvement of bilateral ties, including removal of North Korea from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a full peace treaty ending the Korean War, and normalization of ties, would depend on the Stalinist regime abiding by its pledge to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

Those steps are "all conditioned on action-for-action" progress on the denuclearization deal, said US national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

"It's a process, there are certain actions that we expect by the end of the year, such as the disablement of Yongbyon, and their actions will be met with actions on our end," said Johndroe.

His comments came after North and South Korean leaders called Thursday for a permanent peace pact to end the world's last Cold War divide as they wrapped up a historic summit.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday that a formal peace is part of the deal in the six-party talks.

"It's a matter of historical fact that the United States is party to the (1953) armistice. And that, if you just look back at the September 2005 joint statement, it talks about coming to a peace agreement on the Korean Peninsula as part of the six-party talks," McCormack said.

However, he added, a peace agreement is linked to "the need to move forward on the six-party talks as a whole and the core issue of the six-party talks, which is a denuclearized Korean Peninsula."

In the meantime the North Koreans are benefiting from the "soft diplomacy" on offer from the United States.

The hush-hush tour of Washington on September 8 was a first step. Escorted by US officials and Fred Carriere, executive director of the Korea Society, the diplomats saw much of the US capital's famed sites.

They were not completely impressed, though, Carriere told the Chicago Tribune.

"They were like, 'Is that all?' when they stopped at the White House, he told the newspaper.