US Working With NKorea on Terror List

By MIKI TODA, AP
Fri Nov 2, 6:21 AM EDT
TOKYO —
A top U.S. diplomat said Friday that North Korea must first prove it is not engaged in terrorism before the country is removed from Washington's blacklist of states sponsoring terrorism.

"We want all countries in the list to be removed but we want them to be removed by showing us that they are no longer engaged in the practice that put them on the list," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill told reporters after arriving in Tokyo.

Taking Pyongyang off the terror list, long a key demand of the North, was one of a series of economic and political concessions offered to the country to disable its nuclear reactor that produces plutonium for bombs.

Japan is worried that the U.S. will take North Korea off the list despite the North's refusal to, in Tokyo's view, satisfactorily address the abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s.

The envoy's visit also comes as American experts prepare to start disabling the communist nation's nuclear reactor.

Hill, who said earlier Friday in Seoul that the U.S. is working with North Korea to remove it from the list, said in Tokyo that the U.S. wants to see progress on the abduction issue.

"I stressed to the North Koreans we want to see progress on this issue," said Hill, who met with his North Korean counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, in Beijing earlier this week.

North Korea admitted in 2002 that it kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens and later sent five of them home, saying the remaining eight were dead. North Korea insists the matter is settled, but Japan has demanded proof of the deaths and says more of its citizens may have been taken.

The North was put on the terror list for its involvement in the 1987 bombing of a South Korean jetliner that killed all 115 people aboard.

The designation effectively bars the North from taking out low-interest loans from U.S.-controlled international lenders. Pyongyang has long demanded it be taken off the list, calling it as a sign of U.S. hostility toward the regime.

The U.S. team of nuclear experts, who arrived in Pyongyang on Thursday afternoon, was expected to travel to the North's main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, to start disabling the country's sole functioning reactor there and two other facilities, according to Hill.

The North already shut down the reactor in July, and promised to disable it by year's end in exchange for energy aid and political concessions from its negotiating counterparts _ the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

Disabling the reactor would mark the furthest step that the North has ever taken to scale back its nuclear program. The country conducted its first-ever nuclear test in October of last year.

Hill said it would take at least a year for the North to restart the reactor once disablement is completed, but that it was only the beginning of the disarmament process. The U.S. wants "irreversible dismantlement of all nuclear programs and nuclear weapons and abandonment of all those in North Korea," he said.

North Korea is among five countries on the list, along with Iran, Syria, Sudan and Cuba.

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