ID :
187516
Thu, 06/09/2011 - 14:39
Auther :

N. Korea threatens to disclose voice recordings of secret meeting with S. Korea

(ATTN: UPDATES with quote and background)
SEOUL, June 9 (Yonhap) -- North Korea threatened on Thursday to disclose voice recordings of a secret meeting it had with South Korea last month, during which Seoul allegedly proposed holding a series of inter-Korean summits.
In a surprise move earlier this month, North Korea reported that the two Koreas held a secret meeting in Beijing where Seoul negotiators had "begged" for three inter-Korean summits and offered an envelope of cash as an inducement.
The two Koreas acknowledged that they had held the secret talks but gave different accounts of what happened, prompting one side to accuse the other side of distoring facts.
South Korea had denied that the purpose was to set up summit meetings, rebuffing Pyongyang's claims that it begged for them and offered an unspecified amount of cash as an apparent gift to the North's negotiators.
South Korea also insisted that the secret meeting was to coax North Korea into issuing an apology for its two deadly attacks on the South last year as an exit from the current deadlock in inter-Korean relations.
Seoul has made Pyongyang's apology for the two attacks a key condition for improving inter-Korean relations and resuming the stalled six-party talks on ending the communist regime's nuclear weapons programs.
An official from the North's powerful National Defense Commission, who was involved in the secret meeting, dismissed Seoul's account of the negotiations as a "sheer lie," according to the North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Quoting the North Korean official, the KCNA reported that South Korean negotiators told their North Korean counterparts that the secret meeting was arranged to try to set up inter-Korean summit talks under the direct instruction of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.
The North Korean official also told the KCNA that Southern officials also said the summit must be held and proposed that the two sides hold another secret meeting in Malaysia and Cabinet-level talks to lay the groundwork for the summits -- the first in late June at the border village of Panmunjom, second in September in Pyongyang and third in Seoul on the sidelines of an international security summit.
"Should they continue to decline to reveal the truth and deceive their fellow countrymen and hatch plots, the (North) will have no other choice but to make public the tape recording, the whole course of the contact before the world," the North Korean official said, according to the KCNA.
There was no immediate South Korean response to the latest North Korean offensive.
The leaders of the two Koreas have so far met twice, first in 2000 and again in 2007. Those meetings were held when South Korea was led by two liberal presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.
Inter-Korean relations have frayed badly since conservative President Lee took office in early 2008 with a policy to link aid to progress in ending the North's nuclear ambitions.

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