Global Changes Skew Calculus Of Food Aid For N. Korea

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 15, 2008; A01

SEOUL -- A grim rite of spring in Northeast Asia is the calculation of how many North Koreans could starve before the fall harvest -- and what the neighbors are willing to do about it.

This year, though, the famine bailout season is more urgent, more complicated and more politically explosive than at any time since the mid-1990s, when millions starved behind North Korea's closed borders.

Severe crop failure in the North, surging global prices for food and tougher behavior by donors, particularly South Korea and China, are putting unaccustomed pressure on Kim Jong Il's dysfunctional communist state.

"For Kim Jong Il, this will be his most difficult year," predicts Park Syung-je, a scholar at the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul, referring to the North's dictator. "North Korea does not have much choice for food."

The threat of a calamitous 1990s-style famine has fallen substantially because of the emergence of grass-roots private markets across North Korea and a U.N. system for nutrition monitoring. Still, large numbers of people stand to suffer severe hardship, although probably not death, joining the ranks of the millions of North Koreans who go hungry even when harvests are good and food aid arrives.

Roughly a third of children and mothers are malnourished, according to a recent U.N. study. The average 8-year-old in the North is seven inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than a South Korean child of the same age.

This year is anything but good. Floods last August ruined part of the main yearly harvest, creating a 25 percent shortfall in the food supply and putting 6 million people in need, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

Over the winter, drought damaged the wheat and barley crop, according to a recent report in the official North Korean media. That crop normally tides people over during the summer "lean season" until the fall harvest.

North Korea's ability to buy food, meanwhile, has plunged, as the cost of rice and wheat on the global market has jumped to record highs, up 50 percent in the past six months.

Equally important for North Korea, its reliably generous neighbors seem to be operating under new, less tolerant rules for charity.

For nearly a decade, South Korea had led the world in providing assistance to the North, while setting almost no conditions on aid and asking few questions about who was getting it.

But South Korea's new president, Lee Myung-bak, wants to condition some of his country's gifts of food and fertilizer on progress in removing nuclear weapons from the North, on improvements in human rights and on guarantees that food will go to poor people, not to the North Korean military.

While South Korea will probably end up providing some aid without conditions, a long and politicized debate in Seoul about how much to give and under what conditions is delaying delivery.

"I will not rush but wait until the time is ripe," South Korea's new minister of unification, Kim Ha-joong, told reporters this week.

It seems unlikely that South Korean fertilizer -- a key to preventing crop failure in the coming fall harvest -- will arrive in time for planting, analysts here say.

"Crunch time for fertilizer is now, but negotiations haven't even begun to arrange for delivery," said Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea specialist at Kyungnam University in Seoul. "This means that North Korea's dependency on China has to grow."

But China, the North's closest ally and main trading partner, also seems to be stiffening its food policies.

It has quietly slashed food aid to North Korea, according to figures compiled by the World Food Program. Deliveries plummeted from 440,000 metric tons in 2005 to 207,000 tons in 2006. Last year there was a slight increase in aid, but it remained far below the levels of the past decade.

The reason for the cuts has not been made public, but some analysts believe it is related to North Korea's decision in 2006 to detonate a nuclear device. "China decided to punish the North Koreans," said Andrei Lankov, a professor who specializes in North Korean studies at Kookmin University in Seoul.

The nuclear explosion led the Bush administration to begin negotiating directly with Kim's government. But it also brought on a drastic reduction in the willingness of the United States and much of the rest of the world to give food to North Korea.

Total donations under a World Food Program project declined by more than 80 percent between 2005 and 2007, and U.S. donations fell to zero.

China also appears to have tightened its food squeeze on North Korea for domestic reasons. In order to meet local demand and control inflation, Beijing slapped a 22 percent tariff on grain exports to the North.

China is by far the country's major source of food imports, and the tariffs have resulted in higher prices and less grain in markets across North Korea, according to several aid groups.

Still, if hunger inside North Korea threatens to become widespread famine, China -- host for the Summer Olympics in August -- is certain to rush in large amounts of food, according to diplomats and aid experts.

"China will be elastic," said Lankov, a Russian who studied in the North and is a periodic visitor there. "They are unhappy with North Korea and they want to keep pressure on Kim, but they don't want collapse and they don't want to risk a refugee mess on their border during the Olympics."

In the 1990s, weather-related crop failures in North Korea combined with a reduction in aid from China and from states of the collapsed Soviet Union to cause widespread famine that killed an estimated 2 million people. Since then, though, the risk of famine has fallen substantially, according to food aid specialists and political analysts.

Behind its closed borders, the country has undergone a fundamental change. Analysts say North Korea now has two economies: the crumbling state system, which often fails to pay salaries and supply food, and a growing network of neighborhood markets, where people buy and sell, free of government controls. Kim's government grudgingly tolerates these places.

In the markets -- despite periodic police raids and crackdowns -- euros and dollars can buy Chinese gadgets and clothes. Local and imported food is also available for purchase or barter and would no doubt increase, arriving illegally if necessary, in response to a sudden spike in demand.

"You will never see mass starvation again," said Lee Seung-yong, secretary general of Good Friends, a Seoul-based charity with contacts across the North. "Except for some isolated areas, people have found ways to survive. They know they cannot depend on the government."

Institutionally, mechanisms are in place in North Korea to ring the international alarm bell before hunger turns into mass starvation. The World Food Program monitors nutrition in 50 counties, and the Kim government has become expert in asking for help.

But while famine is much less likely than in the 1990s, so is loyal public tolerance of food shortages, analysts and aid officials say.

These experts agree that cynicism and restiveness have increased because of the highly visible failings of Kim's government, the willingness of poorly paid police to take bribes and the now-proven ability of markets to deliver food and other goods that the state cannot provide.

"There is a small but growing potential of rebellion if the food supply dries up -- and Kim's government knows it," said Lankov, echoing several other analysts and aid experts.

All this could make the coming summer a test of Kim's ability to procure food and keep the lid on inside North Korea while maintaining good relations with his most important patron, China.

Unless foreign aid arrives, food shortages are expected to worsen just as Beijing begins to host the Olympics.

Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.

North Korea Criticizes Military Exercise

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday that annual American-South Korean military exercises that began over the weekend could further delay progress on ending the North’s nuclear weapons programs.

Although such criticism from the Communist country is routine, it dampened hopes for warmer ties between the United States and North Korea — hopes that had been raised after the New York Philharmonic’s concert last week in the North Korean capital., Pyongyang.

News also emerged from Pyongyang over the weekend that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, who did not attend the Philharmonic’s concert, paid a rare visit to the Chinese Embassy on Saturday for “cordial talks” — a move that suggested that Mr. Kim was striking a delicate diplomatic balance between the big powers.

The military exercise, which involves tens of thousands of United States and South Korean troops and the Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was “an exercise for invasion to trigger a nuclear war,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

“This nuclear threat won’t work with us, but will only put the brakes on the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula,” the unnamed spokesman was quoted as saying.

He said North Korea would “further bolster all its deterrent forces,” a term the country often uses to refer to its nuclear arsenal.

The United States and South Korea have been staging annual joint war games for years, and each year North Korea criticizes them.

This year’s weeklong drill, which started Sunday, comes at a delicate time for North Korea.

Frustration in Washington is rising over North Korea’s delays in giving a full accounting of its nuclear programs. In Seoul, Lee Myung-bak, a conservative politician who has championed a tougher stance toward the North, was sworn in as president on Feb. 25.

On Sunday, a North Korean military official was quoted by the official news media as saying that the country was ready to strike back against the military exercises, using “all our means we have prepared at a high cost.”

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the top American negotiator on North Korea, flew to Beijing on Saturday and met with Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei of China to discuss how to restart the stalled nuclear disarmament talks with Pyongyang. But he was stood up by North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan.

Still, Mr. Hill held out hope for resuming the so-called six-party talks, which involve North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. “Time is short so I hope we can get on with that this month,” Mr. Hill, who is on a 16-day trip to Asia, said Monday at a news conference in Hanoi, Reuters reported.

The disarmament talks are bogged down over Pyongyang’s failure to meet the agreed-upon deadline of Dec. 31 to make a complete declaration of its nuclear programs.

Analysts say the main sticking point is North Korea’s reluctance to state whether it tried to enrich uranium or to transfer nuclear technology to Syria.

North Korea agrees to declare, disable nuclear programs by end of year

From the Associated Press

9:07 AM PDT, September 2, 2007

GENEVA — North Korea has agreed to declare and disable all its nuclear facilities by the end of this year, the chief U.S. negotiator said today.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said two days of talks between the United States and North Korea in Geneva had been "very good and very substantive" and would help improve chances of a successful meeting later this month with Japan, Russia, South Korea and China in six-nation talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear weapons program and improving relations between North Korea and other countries.

"One thing that we agreed on is that the DPRK will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007," Hill told reporters, using the initials for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Hill said the declaration will also include uranium enrichment programs, which the United States fears could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Kim Gye Gwan, the head of the North Korean delegation, did not comment immediately to reporters outside the North Korean mission.

Hill said earlier Sunday that improving U.S. relations with North Korea will depend on other progress in the talks, saying it "is a relationship that we will continue to try to build step by step with the understanding that we're not going to have a normalized relationship until we have a denuclearized North Korea."

"To the extent that we can move quickly to denuclearization, we can move quickly to normalization," he added.

Hill said both sides also discussed what needs to be done for North Korea to be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

He said they also had a good discussion of what North Korea wants to achieve and how it can improve relations with Japan.

He said he expected the next full session of the six-nation talks would be held in mid-September and that it would produce a "more detailed implementation plan for 'disablement"' of North Korea's nuclear facilities.

The meeting in Geneva was part of a flurry of "working group" sessions called for in February's six-nation accord in which North Korea agreed to disable its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor and declare and eventually dismantle all its nuclear activities.

In exchange, the economically struggling North will receive oil and other aid. The U.S., as part of the agreement, promised to begin the process of removing the country from the terrorism list and work toward full diplomatic relations.

North Korea has already received 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil from Seoul in return for the shutdown of its plutonium reactor in July. The energy-starved country will eventually get further energy or other aid equivalent to 950,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in return for irreversibly disabling the reactor and ending all its nuclear programs, but has yet to set a date by when it will disable its nuclear facilities.

Another point of disagreement has been over allegations that North Korea has a second, undeclared nuclear weapons program using enriched uranium. North Korea said recently it was willing to discuss the issue, although it did not acknowledge having such a program.

Years of tension and deadlock over North Korea's nuclear program -- which peaked with the country's nuclear test last October -- have started to ease in recent months as the talks have made progress.

False report of rescue operation aired

8/1/2007 11:05 PMNEW YORK (AP) -- An erroneous report Wednesday that an operation was underway to rescue the South Korean hostages in Afghanistan played widely in the media, raising questions about whether reporting such maneuvers in real time might put the operation itself at risk.
The Taliban has held a group of 21 church-group volunteers hostage for two weeks, seeking the release of prisoners, including some held by the United States. A deadline set by the Taliban passed on Wednesday with no word of the hostages' fate.
The Reuters news service issued a three-paragraph report at 7:42 a.m. ET Wednesday that an operation aimed at rescuing the hostages was underway. A full-length story moved at 7:51 a.m. Both stories quoted Khowja Seddiqi, a district chief in the area, as the source.
At 9:31 a.m., Reuters sent notice that the story had been withdrawn, saying that "the official quoted in the story did not make the comment reported."
"The error occurred because of a miscommunication between correspondents," Reuters spokesman Ty Trippet said. "When it became clear that this was not the case, we immediately issued a worldwide advisory withdrawing the original story and making clear that it was wrong."
The Associated Press could get no confirmation of the original Reuters report, spokesman Paul Colford said. The news agency ran a story later in the morning saying that the Afghan military denied media reports claiming that a rescue attempt had been launched.
One potential source of confusion was that the Afghan military had dropped leaflets in the area warning residents of an upcoming military mission. The military said action was weeks away and unconnected to the hostage crisis.
The confusion over the leaflets had nothing to do with Reuters' original report, Trippet said.
CNN's Kiran Chetry, at 8:29 a.m., said that Reuters had reported that a rescue operation had started. Fox News Channel's Steve Doocy said there were "some wire reports today that the army over there is dropping leaflets on towns saying, you know, you better get out because we are about to launch an operation to try to liberate these people."
ABC News ran the Reuters report on its website, although spokesman Cathie Levine said the network had incorrectly, it turned out confirmed the report. It was couched on "Good Morning America," where it was reported that a rescue operation "may be getting underway."
A report on BBC News was led: "Fighting has erupted in the area where a group of South Korean hostages are being held by the Taliban, suggesting an operation has begun to free them."
Both South Korea and the United States have ruled out military operations to rescue the hostages, South Korea's foreign minister said after meeting with a U.S. diplomat on Thursday.
The idea of reporting on such a mission before the results are known can pit competing interests against each other: the compelling need of news organizations to report the news as it knows it versus the knowledge that the news may put some people in danger.
In this case, the AP "might have waited to report (news of a rescue operation) until there was some indication that our reporting wasn't going to cause additional danger," said John Daniszewski, the news organization's international editor. "The general policy is we would not want to inject ourselves into the story and cause danger to people."
He compared it to reporters invited along on a police raid. They wouldn't call the targets of the raid for comment ahead of time, he said.
"You don't want to be part of the story," he said. "You want to be a witness to it."
Levine said ABC News also takes such things into account. "In this case, the story had already been on a wire service and had been reported worldwide," she said.
Reuters declined to address the issue, other than to note that its original report had been sourced to an Afghan official.
(This version corrects time of second report to 7:51 a.m., not p.m.)

N. Korea Talks Fizzle With No Disarmament Timetable

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 21, 2007; A08

BEIJING, July 20 -- After three days of upbeat talks, negotiators from six nations announced Friday that they had failed to agree on a schedule for North Korea to take the next steps toward nuclear disarmament. They plan to meet again in September.

The United States and other countries pressed North Korea to accept a year-end deadline for fully disclosing all its nuclear activities and permanently disabling its main reactor, key moves toward the goal of the eventual complete dismantlement of its nuclear program.

But the North Koreans insisted on tighter coordination for what they would get in return for such steps, including 950,000 tons more fuel oil and progress toward better diplomatic relations, according to the chief U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill.

The outcome was another setback for the Chinese-sponsored negotiations -- including Japan, the United States, Russia and the two Koreas in addition to China -- that have been off and on for the past four years.

Diplomats had expressed hopes of keeping up the momentum generated by North Korea's closure Saturday of its main nuclear reactor in return for 50,000 tons of fuel oil to power its electricity generators.

The shutdown and oil deliveries constituted the first on-the-ground compliance with an accord reached in Beijing on Feb. 13 laying out a choreographed series of North Korean nuclear disarmament steps to be matched by economic aid and friendlier diplomatic ties with Washington and its Asian allies.

North Korea's statements have indicated that it expects improved relations to include an end to economic sanctions, removal from the U.S. list of governments supporting terrorism and less hostility from Japan. Linking these goals to the disarmament steps was the issue that diplomats proved unable to resolve in Beijing this week -- and that they may find haunting them in the days ahead.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry warned Friday, for instance, that the six-party talks could go into another stall if Japan continued to link aid to the dispute over Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean intelligence agents. Japan has refused to contribute economic aid to North Korea until it gets more information about what happened to Japanese citizens whom North Korean agents took to the communist state in the 1970s and '80s.

As the talks broke up, the diplomats decided to hand off discussions to lower-level working groups, assigned to coordinate the next steps with corresponding moves by the United States, Japan and others. A communique from China said the chief negotiators and their teams would return in September to try again for a firm schedule, based on information to be generated by the working groups.

The abductees will be the subject of one of the working groups, the Chinese communique said. Another group will focus on normalization of relations between the United States and North Korea, raising the issue of how swiftly the Bush administration can deliver the politically sensitive diplomatic changes demanded by North Korea.

In addition, Hill noted, some of the sequencing between aid deliveries and North Korean steps to dismantle the nuclear program demands technical expertise beyond the reach of nonspecialists. North Korea's port facilities allow it to absorb only about 50,000 tons of oil at once, for instance, suggesting that other forms of economic aid may have to be substituted to keep the corresponding steps by North Korea up to speed.

Departing Beijing on his way home, Hill portrayed the delay as a minor hiccup rather than the harbinger of another prolonged stall by North Korea. "I'm still of the view that with a little luck we can wrap this all up by the end of the year, but it's obviously going to be difficult," he told reporters.

Report That Taliban Killed 7 Hostages Is Disputed

By BARRY BEARAK and MARK LANDLER

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 21 — A man identifying himself as a Taliban spokesman said the insurgents had killed two German and five Afghan captives on Saturday, adding that they also intended to kill 23 South Korean captives if their demands for the release of an equal number of Taliban prisoners were not met within 24 hours.

The claim that seven hostages were dead could not be verified, and Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry denied the report, insisting that one of the German hostages had died of a heart attack and that the other was still alive.

“Our efforts at negotiations are ongoing and the government will use every legal means available to get the remaining hostage released,” said Sultan Ahmad Baheen, a Foreign Ministry spokesman.

As is the case with many rapidly developing news events here, the truth was difficult to determine.

Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, one of several people who claim to speak for the Taliban, announced early in the afternoon that the two German captives had been killed because Berlin had not heeded a deadline for announcing the removal of its 3,000 troops from Afghanistan.

The unidentified hostages, described in the German news media as engineers, were kidnapped Wednesday with five Afghan colleagues as they traveled on a main highway southwest of the capital.

Though Mr. Ahmadi offered no proof of his claim, he said that the first German had been executed at 12:05 p.m. and the second at 1:20 p.m. The five Afghans, he said, were killed at 2 p.m.

“We are holding 23 South Koreans, and 18 of them are women,” he said, referring to a group of Christian volunteers whose bus was hijacked at gunpoint on Thursday in Ghazni Province. “We know that these people have come here to convert our good Muslims away from Islam. If they were not women, we would have killed them on the spot.”

German officials, like their Afghan counterparts in Kabul, were skeptical of Mr. Ahmadi’s assertions.

For days, officials in Berlin have been dealing with contradictory statements from the Taliban. “One person said, ‘We don’t have any German hostages,’ ” said Amelie Utz, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. “The other said, ‘We have German hostages and we’re going to kill them.’ ”

Still, she said, Germany is taking the reports of the killings seriously. Chancellor Angela Merkel postponed an interview on Saturday with the state broadcaster, ARD, citing the situation in Afghanistan.

German officials are increasingly concerned that their citizens, especially those working in Afghanistan, could be the targets of attacks because of the nation’s participation in the NATO-led military force.

The interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said last month that Germany faced a heightened threat of terrorism because of its presence in Afghanistan. In October, the Parliament is scheduled to vote on extending the mandate of its 3,000 troops. If the hostages have indeed been murdered, that would deepen an already-tense debate over Germany’s continued participation.

The executions, if confirmed, would almost certainly make the situation more dire for the South Korean church group.

Mr. Ahmadi, when contacted by journalists on Friday, first said the South Koreans would be killed if their government did not announce the removal of its 210 troops in Afghanistan by noon on Saturday. But that deadline came and went without any further word.

The South Korean troops, who largely do medical assistance and reconstruction work, already were scheduled to leave the country at the end of the year.

“Under the existing plan, we only have several months to go before the troops complete their mission and pull out,” South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun told reporters on Saturday. “They can’t pick up and leave immediately. They move as dictated by the military plan.”

In a televised plea on Saturday, Mr. Roh called for the release of the hostages. “Under any circumstances, precious lives must not be lost. The Korean government is prepared to make its utmost effort with the relevant parties to secure the speedy release of the Korean citizens,” he said.

President Roh described the hostages as humanitarian workers. “We understand the kidnapped South Koreans have been doing medical volunteer services,” he said.

Barry Bearak reported from Kabul, and Mark Landler from Frankfurt. Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kabul.

Taliban Kidnaps S. Korean Christians, Issues Ultimatum

By Fisnik Abrashi
Associated Press
Saturday, July 21, 2007; A14

KABUL, July 20 -- Taliban fighters kidnapped at least 18 South Korean Christians from a bus Thursday, and a man purporting to speak for the Taliban said later that they would be killed within 24 hours unless South Korea withdrew its 200 troops from Afghanistan.

In the largest abduction of foreigners since the Taliban was driven from power in 2001, several dozen fighters kidnapped the South Koreans at gunpoint on a highway in Ghazni province on Thursday, said Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the provincial police chief.

South Korean leaders "have got until tomorrow [Saturday] at noon to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, or otherwise we will kill the 18 Koreans," Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, who claims to speak for the Taliban, told the Associated Press by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. "Right now they are safe and sound."

[South Korea said Saturday it plans to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year as scheduled. Foreign Minister Song Min Soon told reporters that 23 South Koreans were kidnapped and indicated that they were safe.]

Outmatched by foreign troops, Taliban fighters often resort to kidnapping civilians caught traveling on treacherous roads, particularly in the country's south, where the insurgency is raging. The tactic hurts President Hamid Karzai's government by discouraging foreigners involved in reconstruction projects from venturing into remote areas where their help is most needed.

The abductions came a day after two Germans and five Afghan colleagues working on a dam project were kidnapped in central Wardak province. Ahmadi said the Taliban was also holding the two Germans, and he threatened that they would be killed unless Germany withdrew its 3,000 troops from a NATO-led force by noon Saturday -- the same deadline he gave South Korea.

A year ago, hundreds of South Korean Christians were ordered to leave Afghanistan amid rumors they were proselytizing in the deeply conservative Islamic nation. A member of that group promised they would return to the country in smaller groups, but denied the accusations of spreading Christianity.

The South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that most of the people taken hostage Thursday were members of the Saemmul Community Church in Bundang, just south of the South Korean capital, Seoul.

N. Korea nuclear talks shun deadlines for disarmament

From Reuters

July 20, 2007

BEIJING — Talks to end North Korea's nuclear arms program veered away Thursday from setting a deadline for the next phase of disarmament but settled on a set of tasks the United States said could be carried out this year.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said this week that North Korea had closed five main nuclear facilities, completing the first stage of a disarmament deal reached in February.

The six-nation talks in Beijing were seeking consensus on the second stage of disarmament: permanently disabling the Yongbyon nuclear complex and receiving a full declaration of Pyongyang's atomic arms activities in return for heavy fuel oil.

Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said the envoys broadly agreed on how that next phase will unfold but did not agree on a deadline. At the start of the latest talks Wednesday, he had proposed completing the steps by year's end.

Closure of the Yongbyon nuclear complex was delayed for many weeks by a financial snarl that held up North Korea's receipt of more than $20 million in frozen bank funds.

Hill said negotiators wanted to avoid more broken deadlines.

South Korea Sends Oil Aid to North Korea

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:39 a.m. ET

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A shipment of oil headed Thursday to North Korea in exchange for the expected shutdown soon of the communist nation's only working nuclear reactor, which would be the first step by Pyongyang to stop making atomic bombs in nearly five years.

The chief U.N. inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said he expects the agency's monitoring of the shutdown of the North's Yongbyon reactor will start ''early next week'' and the initial inspection is expected to be completed ''within a maybe month or so.''

''I expect that operation to move smoothly,'' ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Seoul of the visit by inspectors to North Korea expected to begin Saturday. ''I am quite optimistic that this is a good step in the right direction.''

A South Korean ship -- the 6,750-ton No. 9 Han Chang -- departed for North Korea from the port of Ulsan on South Korea's southeast coast, carrying an initial batch of 6,200 tons of heavy fuel oil being given to the North for its agreement to shut down Yongbyon.

The ship was expected to arrive Saturday in the North's northeastern port of Sonbong and will take some 48 hours to unload.

North Korea, after refusing to go forward with the accord for months due to a banking dispute with the U.S. government, strongly hinted last week that it would undertake the long-delayed shutdown as soon as it receives an initial shipment of oil aid.

The shipment is part of 50,000 tons promised for the reactor shutdown, and the North would get an additional 950,000 tons of energy aid if it disables all its nuclear facilities under a February deal with the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

If the North shuts down Yongbyon, it would be the first move it has made to scale back its atomic weapons development since the nuclear standoff began in late 2002. In the first months of the crisis, Pyongyang kicked out U.N. monitors and restarted Yongbyon.

Tensions in the standoff climaxed with the North's first-ever nuclear test in October last year.

ElBaradei said that beyond these initial moves, the North's eventual entire abandonment of its nuclear facilities would be a ''long process'' that would depend on progress at the six-nation disarmament talks.

''We should not delude ourselves,'' said ElBaradei, who was attending an international atomic technology conference in Seoul. ''It will take time to have a comprehensive solution.''

On Wednesday, he had said it was unclear when the North would actually switch off the reactor.

China's Foreign Ministry said Thursday that international talks on dismantling North Korea's nuclear bomb program will resume next week. Spokesman Qin Gang announced at a regular news conference that the talks would be held July 18-19 in Beijing. The negotiations were last held in March.

North Korea had refused to honor the shutdown pledge because of a banking dispute with the U.S. surrounding North Korean funds frozen in a Macau bank blacklisted by Washington over accusations of money laundering and counterfeiting. The financial dispute was resolved recently as the U.S. helped release the funds.

------

Associated Press reporters Ahn Young-joon in Ulsan, South Korea, and Bo-mi Lim in Seoul contributed to this report.

Six-nation nuclear talks will resume

International disarmament talks on North Korea's nuclear program will resume in Beijing next week, a report said, as the U.N. nuclear watchdog prepared to oversee Pyongyang's promised shutdown of its reactor.

China has informed participating countries that the negotiations will start July 18, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. Talks involving China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States were last held in March.

Today, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said United Nations nuclear inspectors would return Saturday to North Korea to monitor the shutdown.

N. Korea puts new demand, may delay nuclear shutdown

Mon Jul 2, 2007 5:34PM EDT

By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea has said it wants to get promised shipments of oil before shutting down its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, delaying again a key obligation under a February nuclear agreement, U.S. officials said on Monday.

Administration critics of the agreement said the demand was further evidence of North Korean bad faith, but two other senior officials said they believe the agreement was on track and any delay in shuttering Yongbyon would not be prolonged.

Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said last week he wanted Pyongyang to shut down Yongbyon, which produces plutonium for the North's main nuclear weapons program, before holding a new round of six-country talks, expected next week.

But U.S. officials told Reuters Pyongyang had informed South Korea, which is providing the heavy fuel oil, and the International Atomic Energy Agency that it wanted at least some of the heavy fuel oil before the reactor is shut down.

"I think there's a sense that the North Koreans do want to start receiving elements of the 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil as they move toward shutting down Yongbyon," said one U.S. official, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity.

After the February 13 announcement, a different senior official who briefed reporters said that there would be no shipment of the heavy fuel oil "until we're satisfied that the shutdown, the sealing, is occurring..."

U.S. officials say Yongbyon is continuing to operate and there are no signs of preparations for a shutdown.

"SLOW ROLLING"

A member of the administration who opposes the deal accused Pyongyang of "slow rolling us again."

But a supporter urged patience, saying the North Koreans just wanted assurances the fuel oil shipments would happen. "We are down to a couple of weeks" when the nuclear reactor will be shuttered, he said.

South Korea will begin shipping fuel oil in two weeks and try to complete the supply in 20 days, its unification ministry said on Saturday, after two days of talks with the North on the details of the energy aid.

Under the February 13 deal North Korea is to receive another 950,000 tons of fuel oil or other aid of equivalent value when it completes steps to disable all its nuclear facilities.

North and South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China struck a deal on February 13 under which Pyongyang would receive aid and security steps in return for moving to scrap its nuclear arms programs.

The deal was stalled for weeks by a dispute over some $25 million in North Korean funds frozen in a Macau bank under pressure from Washington. Following the release of the funds, North Korea agreed to implement the deal.

The IAEA, the guardian of international nuclear safeguards, will monitor and verify the disarmament steps.

After visiting Pyongyang last week, IAEA official Olli Heinonen said the negotiations had achieved an understanding on how to monitor the sealing and shutdown of Yongbyon.

But he said the timing of the long-negotiated shutdown still needed to be worked out between North Korea and its negotiating partners.

On June 21, Hill made a surprise trip to Pyongyang and predicted North Korea could shutter Yongbyon within three weeks, but that target now seems to have slipped.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack on Monday rejected a six-party meeting to set a date for sealing Yongbyon but said six-party talks to discuss next steps in the Feb 13 agreement would convene "around the time" the shutdown begins.

He said the administration did not have a specific date in mind, only that the shutdown should be "as soon as possible."