- North Korea yesterday called President Bush an "imbecile"
and "a tyrant that puts Hitler into the shade" in a stream of
insults that seemed to rule out any progress on nuclear disarmament talks
before the US presidential elections.
-
- "The meeting of the working group for the six-party
talks cannot be opened because the US has become more undisguised in pursuing
its hostile policy toward North Korea," a foreign ministry spokesman
told the state-controlled news agency.
-
- New talks are due to be held in Beijing in September
or October, as North Korea's neighbours and the US seek to per suade it
to stop making nuclear weapons.
-
- Yesterday's tirade was apparently set off by a campaign
stop remark last week by President Bush, who referred to the North Korean
leader, Kim Jong Il, as a "tyrant".
-
- Pyongyang's diplomatic spokesman called Mr Bush "an
idiot, an ignorant, a tyrant and a man-killer".
-
- He added: "Bush's assumption of office turned a
peaceful world into a pandemonium unprecedented in history as it is plagued
with a vicious circle of terrorism and war. The president's aides and allies
are "a typical gang of political gangsters".
-
- John Kerry, the Democrat presidential candidate, has
indicated that, if elected president, he would pursue direct bilateral
talks with North Korea within the existing six-country framework. He has
criticised President Bush for promising to pull out a third of the 36,000
US troops in South Korea without any reciprocal military concession from
Pyongyang.
-
- "The North Koreans made it very clear, politely,
that they want Kerry to win the election," said C Kenneth Quinones,
a former US diplomat who was in Pyongyang earlier this month for a Korean
studies conference. "Nobody wants to move. North Koreans are going
to play wait and see."
-
- Mr Quinones, who worked on talks in 1994 that led to
a first nuclear control accord with North Korea, added: "The six-party
talks have stabilised the situation. But the process will require the US
to sit down with the North Koreans in a smoke-filled room for three months
and bring out an agreement."
-
- In Pyongyang, official irritation with the US has increased
with the passage last month by the House of Representatives of the North
Korean human rights act, a bill that seeks to support North Korean refugees
in China.
-
- Increasingly nervous over the defector issue, North Korea
has criticised South Korea for taking 460 North Korean refugees to Seoul
last month.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/article/0,2763,1289340,00.html
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