SEOUL (AFP) — South Korea's top negotiator Wednesday defended a US-North Korean deal that put a nuclear disarmament pact back on track, despite criticism in Tokyo and Seoul that Washington conceded too much.
The US State Department earlier confirmed the North is resuming work to disable its plutonium-producing plants, following an agreement on nuclear inspections that led Washington to drop Pyongyang from a terrorism blacklist.
The United States has said it got everything it wanted in the agreement on outside inspections to verify the North's nuclear activities.
However, critics say the secretive communist state will still be able to hide some of its programmes.
"The delisting will enable North Korea to come out to the international community," Seoul's negotiator Kim Sook told a meeting of ruling party leaders.
Also on Wednesday, North Korea's foreign minister met in Moscow with his Russian counterpart for nuclear talks bolstered by a US decision to drop Pyongyang from its terrorism blacklist.
"A positive dynamic has emerged in the solution of the nuclear problem of the Korean peninsula," Moscow said ahead of the talks between North Korea's Pak Ui-Chun and Russia's Sergei Lavrov.
The listing had barred some bilateral economic aid and blocked assistance to the impoverished North from the World Bank and other multilateral bodies.
Kim, who was quoted by a ruling party spokesman, told the closed-door meeting the delisting is mainly symbolic at present and setting up such assistance would be a "prolonged process."
In a separate article in Wednesday's Chosun Ilbo newspaper, Kim said the verification deal normalised a six-nation talks process, even though there was still a long way to go to achieve full denuclearisation.
That process -- which involves the two Koreas, China, Russia, Japan and the United States -- produced an agreement last year offering the North energy aid and diplomatic concessions in return for disarmament.
However the pact came close to breakdown because of North Korea's angry objections to US-led demands for strict inspections.
Pyongyang retaliated by barring International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors from plants at its Yongbyon complex and saying it would work to restart them.
Washington in turn refused to remove the North from its list of state sponsors of terrorism until there was a deal on verification.
After the delisting was announced Saturday, the North said it would resume the work it began last November to make the plants unusable.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Tuesday the IAEA has resumed its work and the North Koreans "have started the reversal of their reversal" of disablement.
Critics, including conservative Seoul newspapers, point out that the verification protocol fails to force the North to open suspected nuclear sites.
Inspectors will have access to all the facilities the North formally declared in June, but undeclared sites can only be inspected by "mutual consent."
This means they will need the North's approval to check suspicions of a secret enriched uranium weapons programme and of proliferation activities.
Negotiator Kim was quoted as saying that the North included 21 sites in its declaration. "Not only the declared facilities but also undeclared facilities should be verified at an appropriate time," he told the ruling party.
Japan is unhappy at the delisting, saying the North should first have fully accounted for the fate of Japanese civilians it kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s.
Prime Minister Taro Aso said Tuesday that Japan understood the US decision was a means to move forward the stalled six-nation talks.
"But we have made it clear that we are not content with the delisting," Aso told a parliamentary committee.
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