WASHINGTON, March 23 -- Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter will likely visit North Korea next month to broker rapprochement in U.S. relations with the reclusive communist state, which have chilled over the North's nuclear and missile programs and other provocations, a diplomatic source here said Wednesday.
| Any chance they'll keep the anti-Semitic old coot? |
"It is highly likely that ex-President Carter will travel to North Korea in about a month as the North Korean mission in New York has been arranging for the visit," said the source, who requested anonymity.
Carter is expected to be accompanied by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other prominent figures who are ready to be middlemen in U.S. relations with the impoverished but nuclear-armed state.
| Just what we need, a bunch of washed-up has-beens deciding how we handle the Norks. |
Carter visited Pyongyang in August and brought back Aijalon Gomes of Boston, who had been sentenced to eight years in a labor camp and fined about US$700,000 for illegally entering North Korea months earlier.
Carter brokered a bilateral U.S.-North Korea deal during the first North Korean nuclear crisis in 1994, which led to the Geneva Agreed Framework later that year. The pact called for the freezing of the North's plutonium-producing nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, north of its capital, Pyongyang, in return for massive energy and other economic aid and diplomatic recognition by Washington.
| That worked out well, didn't it. The old 'Agreed Framework' really did cause the Norks to reform, ev'ryone sees that... |
Speaking to reporters, State Department spokesman Mark Toner repeated that the U.S. has "nothing really to announce" on any planned meeting with North Korean officials. |