The United States is willing to address a
long-time North Korean demand for signing a peace treaty as a way of providing
a security guarantee for the communist regime and ultimately as a security
structure for entire Northeast Asia, a U.S. envoy said Wednesday.

South and North Korea, divided since 1945, remain technically at war, since the
1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

North Korea has long sought a peace treaty with the United States, claiming that
lack of it is proof of U.S. hostility toward its regime. The United States led
15 allied forces in fighting against the North in the Korean conflict.

"What we signaled to the DPRK is our interest in pursuing it, if they wish to
pursue it," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said of a peace
treaty at a forum.

DPRK, or Democratic People"s Republic of Korea, is North Korea"s official name.

"By signaling our interest in it, by (South Korea) signaling its interest in it,
we have signaled clearly to the DPRK that if it wants this and if it sees this
as part of... the need to demonstrate to itself or to whoever else that we do
not have a hostile policy toward the DPRK... we are certainly prepared to
pursue it," he said.

Hill"s comments suggested Washington was more active than believed in discussing
the peace treaty. He said he talked to the Chinese, also a signatory of the
armistice, about it. He said he discussed it not only during the six-party
sessions but in bilateral talks with North Koreans prior to the start of the
multilateral negotiations.

Hill leads the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks aimed at ending North
Korea"s nuclear weapons development. South Korea, China, Japan and Russia are
also involved.

The latest round of the talks went into recess after 13 days of negotiations
failed to produce an agreement, or a "statement of principles." The talks are
expected to resume the week of Aug. 29.

Hill said that while human rights are a concern with regards to North Korea, it
will not be an issue in getting to an agreement on the nuclear issue.

"I am sure that this will not be an impediment to reaching an eventual
agreement," he said.

Human rights should not be "instrumentalized to torment some country"s record,"
he said. "Rather, it should be used simply as an expression of what are
international standards and what the price of the ticket is to the
international community."

The envoy chose to draw a larger picture, one that focused on a fundamental
decision required of North Korea and a future security framework for Northeast
Asia.

The fundamental question, he said, is whether North Korea truly wants to be
integrated into the world, whether the issues that are on the negotiation table
"are in fact what the Pyongyang leadership wants."
"And it"s a very fundamental question that the DPRK, that North Korea needs to
make," Hill said.

"We are not just talking about denuclearization, we are actually building a
structure in Northeast Asia... and so the hope is that this six-party process
can be a sort of embryonic structure for Northeast Asia."
The diplomat characterized the statement of principles, which may boil down to
two to three pages, as the end results rather than an enumeration of
step-by-step process.

"I think what"s important is for everyone to know where we are going to end up,
and that"s what the statement of principles is all about," he said.

Hill repeated that North Korea needs to renounce all nuclear-related activities
but said there was an understanding on medical, agricultural and industrial use
of such capacity.

"Well, we understand that there are some uses there that do not involve, you
know, fuel cycle issues," he said, "It did come up, and we know that."
He described provision of energy to the North as one of the centerpiece of the
proposed agreement at the six-party talks, stressing the urgency of the
situation there.

"North Korea is losing capacity as we speak... power stations going off line,"
said Hill. "But certainly our view is that the whole purpose of this
agreement... is to provide the energy that the DPRK needs in terms of the
electrical energy and to do it in a very... as quickly as possible."
ldm@yna.co.kr