NORTH KOREA SAYS IT WON'T JOIN SIX-NATION TALKS UNTIL TRUTH REVEALED OVER SOUTH KOREAN NUCLEAR EXPERIMENTS
China, host of three previous rounds of talks, acknowledged Thursday "many difficulties" stand in the way of this month's talks.
"It is down to North Korea and the United States," Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said in Beijing. "There are many difficulties for the talks to be held as planned."
Kong gave no details but appealed to the participants to "make efforts so we can hold the next round before the end of September, as we agreed earlier."
North Korea relayed its position on the talks when British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell visited Pyongyang earlier this week, an unidentified spokesman of the North Korean Foreign Ministry told the country's official news agency, KCNA.
The comments further clouded U.S.-led international efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear activities.
During Rammell's four-day visit that ended Tuesday, North Korea "clarified its stand that it can never sit at the table to negotiate its nuclear weapon program unless truth about the secret nuclear experiments in South Korea is fully probed," KCNA quoted the North Korean spokesman as saying.
