U.S. to Resume Dialogue With North Korea

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei —  After 18 months of menacing rhetoric by both nations, the United States and North Korea will resume their dialogue as a result of the first contact Wednesday between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun.

“We have agreed to resume the dialogue between North Korea and the United States,” Paek said after an informal, 15-minute chat early Wednesday at an annual Asian summit here. “Everything went satisfactorily.”

Powell later described the talks, held over coffee in a delegates lounge, as a good meeting. “We agreed where we are, and I told him that we should stay in touch and see how to pursue our dialogue,” Powell said after a meeting here with Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov.

North Korea also said it would welcome a formal proposal for further discussions, a senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Powell. But the secretary will not make a decision on that point until he gets back to Washington for further consultations within the administration.

The U.S. goal is a “serious conversation on substantive issues,” including weapons of mass destruction and North Korea’s conventional forces deployed along the border with South Korea, the U.S. official said.

The meeting was only the second of ranking officials from both nations since they were at war half a century ago. Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang in October 2000 to negotiate a deal to limit North Korean production and sales of ballistic missiles. The agreement was never finished because of differences over verification and monitoring.

In a sign of the changing times, Russia urged the world’s most staunchly Marxist regime to engage the Bush administration. Ivanov relayed Moscow’s message to its Communist ally during a visit to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on Monday before flying to the conference here. He then conveyed a message to Powell that North Korea was ready for unconditional talks.

Earlier this year, in his State of the Union message, President Bush described North Korea as one of three nations in an “axis of evil” that produced weapons of mass destruction and endangered democratic nations.

The erratic government of Kim Jong Il appears to be trying to reach out to the world again. South Korea on Tuesday accepted Pyongyang’s proposal to resume talks. Japan also has agreed to talks. Foreign ministers of the two countries held talks Wednesday on the sidelines of the conference in Brunei, an oil-rich sultanate on Borneo.

Yet not everything has changed. Even as Powell and Paek met, North Korea’s state-run media labeled the United States “the aggressor and kingpin of evil.” A commentary in the Communist Party paper Rodong Sinmun also called for Washington to pull its 37,000 troops from South Korea, where they have been based since the 1950-53 war.

The Pyongyang regime also charged Wednesday that South Korea is trying to undermine dialogue by its actions in the Yellow Sea, alleging that several South Korean patrol boats and dozens of fishing craft had crossed into its waters. The disputed area has been the source of frequent tension, including a naval confrontation in late June in which at least four South Korean sailors were killed.

After first blaming the United States and South Korea for the confrontation, the Pyongyang regime abruptly expressed regret last week, putting diplomatic efforts back on track.

News of the Powell-Paek meeting took the limelight from the gathering of 23 Southeast Asian and Pacific Rim countries. But Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the foreign ministers assembled were delighted by the renewed contact.

The meeting also came a week before the U.S., European Union, South Korea and Japan will oversee the beginning of construction of an atomic plant for North Korea.

On Aug. 7, the foundation is to be poured for a light-water reactor, the product of a 1994 agreement negotiated by the United States to end North Korea’s nuclear power program, which the West feared would be used to develop material for nuclear weapons.