South Korea is prepared to make a new and serious proposal to advance six-country talks on North Korea’s nuclear programmes if Pyongyang returns to the stalled negotiations, a South Korean official told the North yesterday. The proposal would differ from an offer of aid and security guarantees made at the last round of the talks in June last year, Vice Unification Minister Rhee Bong-jo told North Koreans at bilateral talks in the northern city of Kaesong, pool reports said. He declined to elaborate on what would be included.

“We conveyed to them that if North Korea comes to the six-party talks, we will prepare a serious proposal for substantive progress in the nuclear problem,” a Unification Ministry official quoted Rhee as telling the North. “The non-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula that South and North Korea agreed to must be kept,” Rhee was quoted as telling the North. “If not, neither national cooperation nor South-North reconciliation will be possible.”

The two Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia met for three rounds of the talks with no substantive progress. South Korea proposed at the third round in June a package of economic aid and security guarantees for the North in return for a pledge by Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear programmes.

<B>Nuclear weapons</B>

Rhee said the new proposal had not been discussed with other countries participating in the talks yet. North Korean officials to the bilateral talks “listened intently”, the pool reports quoted Rhee as saying in Kaesong, just north of the Demilitarised Zone bisecting the peninsula.

North Korea declared in February it had nuclear weapons and said this month it had completed extracting spent fuel from a reactor, a move that could yield more material for atom bombs. Japan’s Kyodo news agency said yesterday North Korea had demanded the theme of the six-way talks be changed to non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials rather than the prevention of nuclear arms development by North Korea.

The report out of Beijing quotes sources close to the six-party talks as saying the North Korean demands were conveyed to China as a new proposal in mid-April. China and the US have agreed accepting such a demand would be difficult, Kyodo said. In the first high-level bilateral talks in 10 months, the impoverished North asked for food aid and fertiliser, the reports from the talks said.

The South made no commitments. The North stopped contact in anger after a secret airlift to the South of more than 460 North Korean refugees from Vietnam.

<B>Jack KIM</B>