North Korea Remains On Terror List, U.S. Envoy Says
(RTTNews) - North Korea must do more to dismantle its nuclear program before the United States takes it off a list of states sponsoring terrorism despite claims that the communist state's designation had been already lifted, a senior U.S. diplomat said.
"No, they haven't been taken off the terrorism list," Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill told reporters as he arrived in Australia's for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.
North Korea, which said Monday that the United States has decided to remove it from a list of states sponsoring terrorism, claimed the decision to remove the designation came after a weekend meeting between chief nuclear negotiators from the two countries in Geneva, a foreign ministry spokesman told the official Korean Central News Agency.
"Both sides discussed the issue of taking practical measures to neutralize the existing nuclear facilities in the DPRK (North Korea) within this year and agreed on them," the spokesman said. "In return for this, the US decided to take such political and economic measures for compensation as delisting the DPRK as a terrorism sponsor and lifting all sanctions that have been applied according to the Trading with the Enemy Act."
In addition to U.S. sanctions, the terror designation also blocks North Korea from receiving loans from such international financial institutions as the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. Among other nations with a similar blacklisted status: Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.
North Korea has been considered a terror-sponsoring state since January 1988, after a North Korean agent confessed to the 1987 bombing of a South Korean passenger jet over the Indian Ocean that killed all 115 people on board.
North Korea getting off the list will require "further denuclearization," Hill told reporters later Tuesday after a meeting with Japan's nuclear envoy.
He added that Pyongyang knows "what these steps are."
Already, the North Korean government has closed its Yongbyon facility, which produced weapons-grade plutonium fuel in exchange for economic aid and political concessions as part of its so-called six-party talks with the U.S., South Korea, Russia, China and Japan.
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