A week of diplomatic negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons ended with no progress on Friday, with envoys failing even to set a firm date to meet again, REUTERS REPORTED. The six parties -- the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China -- agreed only to report to their capitals and "reconvene at the earliest opportunity", said a statement read by chief Chinese negotiator Wu Dawei. Envoys had sought to focus on a September 2005 agreement that offered the North aid and security guarantees in return for disarmament, but Pyongyang remained preoccupied with getting U.S. financial curbs against it lifted. The six, meeting in the shadow of North Korea's first nuclear test on Oct. 9, "held useful discussions on measures to implement the joint statement and on actions to be taken by the parties in the first phase and put forward some ideas", the statement said. Throughout the five days of talks, the first in more than a year, envoys said North Korea would talk about little other than the freeze on its accounts at Macau's Banco Delta Asia. Washington says the bank was complicit in Pyongyang's alleged money-laundering and dollar counterfeiting. North Korea said the financial curbs -- announced shortly after the breakthrough September 2005 deal -- showed Washington had negotiated in bad faith. But chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill questioned just how seriously North Korea was prepared to talk about disarmament, saying the financial dispute was a pretext to avoid the real issue at hand. "Our goal is denuclearisation. Period," he told reporters early in the day. "They need to show some seriousness of purpose on denuclearisation." "One day it's financial issues, another day it's something they want but know they can't have, another day it was something that was said that hurt their feelings. It's one thing after the other," he said. Hill said early on Friday he was unsure about if or when talks could resume. "The purpose is denuclearisation, so we'll have to evaluate this round in terms of whether we've moved towards that goal." "It all comes down to the question of are they serious, are they acting responsibly? And I think that question is very much unanswered," he said. Failure to make progress would call into question the multilateral negotiations, Japan's chief envoy said. "I think various opinions will emerge on the credibility of the six-party talks," Kenichiro Sasae told reporters. Earlier in the week, Hill had hinted at progress on a deal on concrete steps North Korea would take toward scrapping its nuclear arsenal, probably including Pyongyang allowing back the international inspectors it expelled in 2002. But envoys said the North had subsequently refused to talk about anything but financial curbs. In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed her government's view that the financial issues and the nuclear talks should be kept apart, and said the North Koreans had themselves asked for a separate working group on the matter. The United States met that demand, sending a Treasury delegation to Beijing this week for two days of talks with North Korean officials. They reached no agreement, but the contacts are expected to continue in New York in January.
