960405

N Korea asks for

resumption of rice

talks with South

SEOUL: North Korea on Friday urged South Korea to resume talks in Beijing, to discuss food aid to the North, where thousands are reported to be close to starvation.

The North's mouthpiece news agency, KCNA, said the request was made in a faxed message by Jon Kum-Chol, head of the North's delegation to last year's rice talks, which broke off in acrimony in September.

The appeal was the second in two weeks by the North where the food crisis is reported by the Red Cross to be deepening.

It was addressed to his South Korean counterpart, Ri Sok-Chae, the agency said.

"Jon... sent a second message to his South Korean counterpart, Ri Sok Chae, by fax today, urging him to hold the fourth round of contact in Beijing," KCNA said.

There was no immediate reaction on the new offer here, where Friday is Arbor Day, a national holiday.

The message followed an appeal to Ri on March 20. That request was dismissed by the South at the time as too vague to merit a response.

South Korean officials said at the time they had asked Pyongyang for a more concrete proposal.

Friday's KCNA broadcast, monitored in Tokyo and Seoul, said Seoul had in its response in March slapped new conditions on talks despite a promise by both sides in Beijing in September "to continue the contact".

When the Beijing talks collapsed in September Seoul insisted that the North recognise them as government-to-government.

KCNA said Jon had made it clear in his Friday fax that "convocation of talks between authorities from the South and North of the Korean peninsula" was beyond the competence of the two chief delegates.

"We consider that if your side really wants to have contact on the principle of independence from a national viewpoint, it must withdraw all its unreasonable arguments, though belatedly, and come out to the fourth round of contact in Beijing unconditionally", the agency quoted Jon as saying.

It said South Korea's reply to the March 20 message had also raised "such irrelevant issues as suspension of slanders about the South".

North Korea stunned the world last year by coming out of its rigid isolation to appeal to the international community for food aid after disastrous floods.

South Korea and Japan responded immediately, Seoul with 150,000 tonnes of rice and Tokyo with 500,000 tonnes.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Red Cross both issued appeals, and the United States responded first with a small sum, and then this year with two million dollars in assistance.

The ship carrying the bulk of US-funded aid sank last month, but was insured and will be replaced, the UN said.

The WFP and the Red Cross estimate this year's foodgrain shortfall in the North at around 1.2 million tonnes, and say the problem has been deepening since Russian grain handouts stopped in 1990 and Beijing began asking hard currency for rice.-AFP