Envoy says North Korea to consider plea

Seoul (Agencies): North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who U.S. President George W. Bush says is blackmailing the world with a nuclear arms program, has agreed to consider Seoul's plea to end the crisis, a South Korean envoy said on Wednesday.

The North tried to turn the tables by demanding that the United States remove all its nuclear weapons from South Korea — an action Washington says it carried out 12 years ago.

After a three-day visit to the Northern capital. Pyongyang in which the enigmatic Kim snubbed the South's envoy by failing TO attend expected talks, Lim Dong-won said the communist leader had accepted a letter from South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

The North's reclusive leader had relayed a verbal message through officials promising to reply after considering Seoul's call to reverse the moves that have triggered the second Korean nuclear emergency since 1994, Lim told a news conference on his return.

South Korea had hoped Lim's visit would open the way for a resolution of the three-month-old crisis, but Kim's snub of the envoy appeared to underscore the North's insistence it would talk only to the United States.

"North Korea repeated what it has said to the world: that it has not developed nuclear arms and has no intention to develop them. They said that if the U.S. wants to conduct its own inspections, they are willing to accept that,"Lim said.

Lim voiced disappointment at not meeting Kim Jong-il. But he said it was significant that the Norths leader had pledged to answer Kim Dae-jungs letter urging him to give up his country's suspected uranium enrichment program and return to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The nuclear crisis was sparked in October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to reviving an arms program it had previously agreed to shut down under a 1994 deal.

Pyongyang later expelled UN nuclear inspectors, removed seals from a moth-balled reactor and pulled out of the treaty preventing the spread of nuclear arms.

Bush, who last year branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran, used his latest State of the Union speech on Tuesday to accuse North Korea of deceit and blackmail, but said Washington would work with its allies for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.

"Throughout the 1990s, the United States relied on a negotiated framework to keep North Korea from gaining nuclear weapons. We now know that that regime was deceiving the world and developing those weapons all along," Bush said.

"Today the North Korean regime is using its nuclear program to incite fear and seek concessions. America and the world will not be blackmailed," he said.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry denied on Wednesday that it had a nuclear weapons program and blamed Washington for breaking the 1994 agreement.

Pyongyang also issued a call to the U.S. to withdraw its nuclear weapons from South Korea, apparently a fresh attempt to portray America as the real military threat in the crisis.

On Wednesday, North Korea said that the U.S. was trying to stifle it through economic and political pressure in the same way that a snake smothers and consumes its victim.

In a commentary on its news agency, KCNA, North Korea charged that Washington was using the dispute over North Korea's nuclear activities as a pretext to achieve the ultimate aim of destroying the communist country.

"This strategy is also dubbed a 'serpent' strategy as it is to be carried out in the way a serpent does i.e. swallowing up the object after strangling it," KCNA said.

North Korea says it will resolve the nuclear issue if Washington signs a nonaggression treaty. Washington says a written security guarantee, not a treaty, might be possible if Pyongyang drops its nuclear development.