hankyoreh

a former United States Special Representative for North Korea policy

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

A series of meetings between government officials and private sector experts from the US and North Korea will be held in Berlin, Germany, and London, England. The participants at the so-called 1.5 track meetings will include Ri Yong-ho, North Korea’s vice foreign minister, and Stephen Bosworth, former US State Department special representative for North Korea policy and former US negotiator at the talks.

According to diplomatic sources in Washington, D.C., the Berlin meeting will take place this week, and the London meeting will take place the following week. North Korea will be represented at the meetings both by Choi Seon-hee, deputy director general of the American affairs bureau and Jang Il-hun, deputy ambassador to the UN, sources said.

In addition to Bosworth, American participants at the Berlin meeting will include former assistant secretary of state Robert Gallucci, who played a leading role in the agreed framework signed by the US and North Korea in 1994; Robert Carlin, visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University; and Joel Wit, former North Korea specialist for the State Department.

The meeting in London will be attended by Bosworth, along with Morton Abramowitz, former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research; Joseph DeTrani, former director of the National Counterproliferation Center under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI); Leon Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council; and Tony Namkung, former assistant director for the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.

The reason that Bosworth is attending both of these meeting is because the groups that are organizing these meetings are different, sources say.

Most of the American figures that will be attending these meetings are supportive of US-North Korea talks. These figures believe that the US must stop ignoring the North Korean nuclear issue and must instead seek a solution through negotiations.

Bosworth and DeTrani are of particular interest as the two were in charge of North Korea policy and intelligence during US President Barack Obama’s first term.

North Korea’s decision to dispatch senior officials to these meetings is understood to be tied to its objective of setting the stage for dialogue with the US by increasing contact with American officials.

“I think that North Korea’s actions can be understand partly as a concession to China’s request that it adopt a more cooperative attitude,” said Evans Revere, former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. “At the same time, it is connected with a campaign to win hearts and minds, to repair its image, which was tarnished by its threats to use nuclear weapons earlier this year.”

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