AFP,Seoul -
North Korea offered talks Thursday with South Korea and the United States, but laid out pre-conditions that Seoul dismissed as “absurd” and analysts said would do little to reduce soaring tensions.
The demands laid out by the North’s main military body included the withdrawal of UN sanctions and a permanent end to South Korea-US joint military drills.
The offer followed a month of increasingly hostile exchanges between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington that have included threats of nuclear war and precision missile strikes.
The North’s conditions were swiftly rejected by South Korea which, together with the United States, has made any talks conditional on the North putting its nuclear weapons program on the table.
“North Korea’s demands are totally incomprehensible. It’s absurd,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tai-Young told reporters.
Dialogue has become the new focus of the blistering rhetorical battle that has trapped the Korean peninsula in an escalating cycle of military tensions ever since the North carried out its third nuclear test in February.
South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-Hye, has made tentative -- and conditional -- offers of talks, but the North’s initial response was to swat them away as a “crafty trick.”
Some analysts see the North’s engagement in a debate over dialogue -- no matter how unrealistic the conditions -- as a welcome shift from the apocalyptic threats that have been pouring out of Pyongyang.
“It’s an initial show of strength in a game of tug-of-war that at least shows a desire to have a dialogue down the line,” said Yang Moo-Jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
But others like Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert with the International Crisis Group, ruled out any softening of Pyongyang’s position and said those hoping for dialogue were being willfully naive.
The North, Pinkston argued, had bound itself to a course that could only end with its recognition as a nuclear power -- a status that is anathema to the United States and its allies.
“So what is there to even talk about?” Pinkston said.
“The North is committed. It’s burned its bridges. Any reversal could only be made at immense domestic cost to the regime.”
“And there is simply no way any US administration is going to sit down and confirm a change in the status quo with the North as a nuclear state,” Pinkston said.
“We’re still firmly on a collision course, and it’s not going to end well,” he added.
The first step demanded by the North’s National Military Commission was the withdrawal of “cooked up” UN sanctions that were imposed after the nuclear test in February.
North Korea has repeatedly cited the sanctions as a prime trigger for the current crisis.
The other main bone of contention has been ongoing South Korea-US military drills, which have involved the deployment of nuclear-capable B-52s and B-2 stealth bombers.
Both countries must provide international guarantees that such “nuclear war drills” will never be repeated, the commission said.
“Dialogue and war games can never go together,” it added.
President Park’s dialogue overtures to the North received the backing of US Secretary of State John Kerry during his recent Northeast Asia tour.
But both Park and Kerry stressed any talks would have to be predicated on signals from North Korea that it would “change its ways” and respect its international obligations, especially with its nuclear program.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged Pyongyang on Wednesday to “seriously” consider Seoul’s offer.
The North’s statement made no mention of a possible medium-range missile test -- the expectation of which has kept South Korean and US forces on heightened alert for the past week.
Intelligence reports suggest the North has two Musudan missiles primed to fire from its east coast, and most observers had predicted a launch on or around April 15, the birthday of the North’s late founder Kim Il-Sung.
Presidential security adviser Kim Jang-Soo said Thursday that any missile launch would likely be directed into the East Sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
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