U.S. Relations With the People's Republic of China (2008)

U.S. Department of State

Situation in Somalia

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Remarks Following the UN Security Council Meeting on the Situation in Somalia
New York City, New York
December 16, 2008

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QUESTION: On the Six-Party Talks, the last round of meetings last week ended with no new declaration from North Korea. How do you leave this to your successors, and how do you respond to those who say that this has been a failure?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, we leave in place -- first of all, we are going to continue to work on it until the very last day. But we leave in place a Six-Party framework in which at least five parties are completely agreed as to what the verification mechanism has to look like. I might just note that we have an agreement with the North Koreans about a verification protocol, but there were a number of issues that had to be clarified in order to make sure that that verification protocol was going to be workable. And those assurances were given to us by the North Koreans. We, in fact, reported those assurances to the Chinese chair before this Six-Party round took place. And what happened in Beijing was that the North Koreans at the -- at this last session wouldn't write them down. And at some point, those assurances are going to have to be written down. But there is, in fact, a verification protocol and a set of assurances that the five are agreed to and that the North Koreans, at least privately, before we lifted the terrorist designation, had also agreed to. And so we'll just have to work through this.

I might note, too, that the disabling -- first, the shutdown of the reactor and then the disabling of the reactor has been an important step forward in dealing with the plutonium program. But we have a lot of questions about the highly enriched uranium route for North Korea. We have a lot of questions about proliferation. And we believe that the mechanism of the Six Parties and an associated verification protocol will be the best way to resolve those questions and to get to the bottom of the entire nature of the North Korean program.

And I just might note, too, that the September 19th agreement of a couple of years ago lays out a path for the completely denuclearization of North Korea and of the Korean Peninsula, and that agreement is an agreement among the Six Parties. So I think we leave a pretty good framework, but we'll continue to see if we can get the North Koreans to write down the assurances that they gave us.

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