SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea showed signs Friday it could be backing away from its nuclear showdown with the world, even as it staged a show of domestic support in Pyongyang, where tens of thousands gathered to laud the country’s first atomic test.
Coming under united international pressure, Kim Jong Il reportedly apologized for the Oct. 9 nuclear detonation and said he wouldn’t test any more bombs.
That doesn’t mean Kim can afford to show any weakness to a home crowd who live in an officially enforced siege mentality and are long accustomed to blaming their desperate living conditions on outside forces – mainly the United States.
“No matter how the U.S. imperialists try to stifle and isolate our republic … victory will be on the side of justice,” Choe Thae Bok, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, told a rally of more than 100,000 people, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
The North also held firm to its demand that the U.S. lift financial restrictions that have strangled Pyongyang’s access to banks abroad as a condition to return to disarmament talks.
Washington has repeatedly rejected that request, and appears even more unlikely to alter its hard-line approach to the communist nation in the wake of the nuclear test – leaving the potential for the crisis to escalate further.
“If the U.S. makes a concession to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree, whether it be bilateral talks or six-party talks,” Kim was quoted as telling a Chinese envoy, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo daily reported.
China and the United States on Friday appeared to close ranks on North Korea, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emerged from a day-long series of meetings in Beijing to say that a high-level Chinese government delegation had given North Korea “a strong message” about its nuclear test.
On Friday, all four major Chinese state-owned banks and British-owned HSBC Corp. said they had stopped financial transfers to the North – a step beyond what the U.N. sanctions require and a likely blow to a weak economy that relies on China as a link to the outside world.
The North Korean leader reportedly told the Chinese visitors “he is sorry about the nuclear test,” Chosun Ilbo reported, citing a diplomatic source in China.
Kim also said “we have no plans for additional nuclear tests,” South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported Friday, citing an unidentified diplomatic source in Beijing.
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