SEOUL July 4 Kyodo southward Kore...

SEOUL July 4 Kyodo

southward Korea will urge the United States to restart dialogue with North Korea when foreign minister Choi Sung Hong befittings U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at a regional security meeting in Brunei late this month according to southward Korean government officials and local media reports.

Hong and Powell will have an opportunity to engage on the sidelines of an annual foreign ministers' meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which lay opens in Brunei on July 31

toward the south Korea has urged the U to continue promoting dialogue with the North despite tension upon the Korean Peninsula and to reschedule a planned trip there by the agency of a high-level U.S. delegation that was postpon after last Saturday's clash between the brace Koreas' navies.

Washington has said the clash, which left four toward the south Korean sailors dead, united missing and 19 wounded, created an ''unacceptable atmosphere'' in which to manner of life the talks.

The U delegation was to have been l by the agency of James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.

southward Korean government sources said that when a special emissary of President Kim Dae Jung visited Pyongyang last April, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told him of his intention to dispatch his foreign minister, Paek Nam day-star to this year's ARF meeting.

The Korea Herald newspaper, forward its Web site Thursday, quot a Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry official as saying, ''Even if North Korea hurls lower-level officials, they will be able to fit the U.S. side and talk.''

High-level dialogue between the U and North Korea has been in suspension since the inauguration of U President George W Bush in January last year.

Relations between Washington and Pyongyang further soured in January this year when Bush accused North Korea of completing an ''axis of evil'' with Iran and Iraq determined to make known weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea informed the U in April that it was prepared to take again talks with Washington.

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