By IRNA-Kyodo
Narita : Top U. S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill indicated Friday that North Korea’s declaration of all its nuclear programs should come before Washington removes North Korea from the list of terrorism-sponsoring countries while hoping Pyongyang compiles a ”draft” declaration within this month.
”We would certainly need to see how the declaration is,” Hill, assistance secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told reporters after meeting with his Japanese counterpart Kenichiro Sasae at Narita airport near Tokyo.
”But delisting also depends on some other issues involved directly in delisting and so there’s more work to be done there,” said the chief US delegate to the six-nation talks on North Korean nuclear issues.
”As for the timing of the declaration I do believe they (the North Koreans) can certainly have a draft .produced before the end of this year,” Hill said.
Hill said he handed to Sasae, chief of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, a letter from US President George W. Bush to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on North Korean nuclear issues, although he declined to go into its details.
Revealing part of the text which was faxed to Tokyo on Thursday, meanwhile, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said earlier Friday that Bush called for close cooperation to move forward the multilateral talks Hill met with Sasae on his way back to the United States after visiting North Korea earlier this week to inspect the Yongbyon nuclear complex where work to disable the facilities is being carried out as part of a six-party denuclearization deal.
North Korea is faced with the task of disabling its nuclear facilities and declaring all its nuclear programs by the end of this year in line with a six-party deal in October involving China, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia and the United States.
Sasae, for his part, said he reaffirmed with Hill that Japan and the United States see the development in Pyongyang’s denuclearization and in bilateral ties between Japan and North Korea, including progress in the talks over the abduction issue, as important.
The issue of North Korea’s abductions of Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s has been an obstacle to normalizing bilateral ties and a thorny topic in the working group on Japan-North Korea bilateral ties set up under the six-nation framework.