China, Japan reject sanctions link to talks
(AFP)
Updated: 2006-01-09 18:52

The first sanctions came in September last year when the US Treasury Department told US financial institutions to stop dealing with Macau's Banco Delta Asia, alleging it was a willing front for North Korean counterfeiting.

A month later the US blacklisted eight North Korean companies allegedly involved in the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

The United States has stood by the sanctions and refused to allow the issue to be drawn into the six-party talks, which also include China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia.

"There hasn't been much uproar from anybody else about the fact that we are engaged in trying to constrain these illicit activities," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week.

The sanctions are the latest in a long line of issues to stall the talks which began after the latest nuclear standoff erupted in October 2002, with US charges that North Korea was seeking to build nuclear weapons through a secret uranium enrichment programme.

North Korea agreed in principle in September last year to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for diplomatic and economic benefits and security guarantees.

However the following round of talks in November made virtually no progress, with the sanctions arising as an obstacle.

North Korea again insisted on Monday that the sanctions must be removed before six-party talks can resume, and reasserted that the US claims of impropriety are false.

The North Korean foreign ministry said Pyongyang had scrutinized the US evidence to justify the sanctions.

"We examined the information the US side provided to us, claiming that it was the motive of its application of sanctions," a foreign ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.

"Such things cited by it, however, have never happened in our country."

The Japanese and Chinese officials discussed a range of other, bilateral, issues also on Monday, including rival claims to gas reserves in the East China Sea and the suicide of a Shanghai-based Japanese diplomat in 2004.