News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: US & North Korea

Date: June 01, 2000

US, N.Korea to resume talks on Korean War dead By Arshad Mohammed

ARLINGTON, Va., May 29 (Reuters) - The United States and North Korea will resume talks next month on recovering more than 8,100 U.S. soldiers missing in action from the Korean War, U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Monday.

Clinton said the nations hoped to resume joint operations to search for remains of U.S. soldiers missing from the 1950-53 conflict by the end of this year as he marked the Memorial Day holiday to honour U.S. soldiers killed serving their country.

The talks would take place in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur nearly 50 years after North Korean communist forces invaded South Korea, triggering a three-year conflict that ended with an armistice that divided the Korean peninsula into two countries still technically at war.

Their resumption appears part of the diplomatic offensive that reclusive, Stalinist North Korea has launched in recent months to end its Cold War isolation, notably through a June 12-14 Pyongyang summit that will bring together its enigmatic leader Kim Jong-il with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

``I am pleased to announce to you today that the United States and North Korea have agreed to resume ... talks in the first week of June in Kuala Lumpur in the hopes of resuming recovery operations in North Korea this year,'' Clinton said at a Memorial Day service at Arlington National Cemetery.

``As we prepare to observe the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War on June the 25th, we reaffirm our commitment to the more than 1.7 million American who served in Korea, the more than 36,000 who lost their lives there and the more than 8,100 still missing,'' he added.

Clinton earlier laid a wreath at the cemetery's Tomb of the Unknowns, a white marble sarcophagus placed near the graves of unidentified U.S. soldiers who died in the First and Second World Wars as well as in the Korean War.

``The United States will always honour and never forsake its fallen heroes,'' Clinton said at the ceremony, drawing applause. ``Wherever it takes, as long as it takes, we will keep our commitment to seek the fullest possible accounting.''

The United States and North Korea have identified remains of about 40 U.S soldiers killed during the Korean War through joint operations carried out since since 1996, a U.S. official told reporters.

The official said the two sides last met to discuss the issue six months ago and ran into some disagreements that have since been resolved over how to carry out the operations to search for missing U.S. soldiers in North Korea.

``There were some disagreements over the details that we have obviously worked out,'' said the official.

North Korea has taken several diplomatic steps that signal a new willingness to deal with the outside world, resuming diplomatic ties with Australia earlier this month after 25 years and scheduling the summit with South Korea in June.

This year Italy became the first of the Group of Seven industrialised nations to forge diplomatic ties with North Korea and its Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini visited Pyongyang in March, the most senior Western official to do so.

The warming of relations led Dini to offer Rome as the venue for the fresh round of talks last week between U.S. and North Korean officials on implementing a 1994 agreement to freeze North Korea's nuclear programmes.

The two sides have met on and off in Europe and the United States for the past six years after U.N. nuclear inspectors sounded the alarm that North Korea's civilian atomic power plants could be a front for an arms programme.

The 1994 agreement drew a pledge from the North Koreans to halt development of old-style graphite-moderated nuclear reactors at Yongbyon. Those reactors held radioactive fuel which could be used for nuclear arms manufacture.

In return, the West offered to build more up-to-date light-water reactors.