BEIJING -- New talks aimed at persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear programs opened Wednesday in Beijing, and the chief Chinese envoy called for negotiators to start work on the contentious details of how the North will disarm and what it will get in exchange.
Tensions between the United States and North Korea, however, were already building. The communist country criticized President Bush for calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a "tyrant," saying the remark put the prospects of the talks in doubt.
North and South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China are participating in the fifth set of negotiations. They were expected to last three days before a recess to let diplomats attend an Asia-Pacific economic forum in South Korea.
The Chinese delegate, Wu Dawei, whose government appealed in advance to the participants to be ready to make progress in the slow-moving talks, called on negotiators to be flexible and pragmatic.
In an opening statement, Wu called on all sides to "put forward proposals and ideas so that we will be able to work out an implementation plan that is acceptable to all sides at an early date."
On Tuesday, South Korea's Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon said he met with Kim Gye Gwan, the North's envoy, to discuss the implementation of a joint statement issued at the end of the last round of talks in September.
Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator and assistant secretary of state for Asia affairs, warned that Washington won't discuss giving the North a civilian nuclear reactor, a demand it has made, until Pyongyang returns to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and accepts safeguards from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"First they have got to disarm, create a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, and once they are back in the NPT with IAEA safeguards, at an appropriate time we'll have a discussion about the subject," Hill said.
Pyongyang said Bush's comment cast a shadow over the talks.
Bush made the remark Sunday in Brazil while praising Japan as a close U.S. ally in confronting a "tyrant" in North Korea. He did not mention Kim by name.
"If this is true, what he uttered is a blatant violation of the spirit of the joint statement of the six-party talks, which calls for 'respect for sovereignty' and 'peaceful coexistence,'" a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.
"These remarks ... arouse our serious concern about the prospect of implementing the joint statement and deprive us of any trust in the negotiators of the U.S. side," said the spokesman, who was not identified.
