BEIJING -- North Korea and South Korea agreed Thursday to resume their talks on Saturday while diplomats from North Korea and the United States discussed their often antagonistic relationship for a second and final day.
After talking for more than eight hours Wednesday, U.S. envoy Charles Kartman and North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan met again Thursday at a Beijing hotel. Neither side would comment on the talks.On Wednesday, the two discussed findings by U.S. experts during an inspection last month of a North Korean underground tunnel complex suspected of being a nuclear weapons facility.
The State Department said the inspection did not dispel suspicions about the site, even though the experts found empty tunnels.
Kartman also wanted to go over a range of issues with Kim, including peace talks with China and South Korea and offers to improve U.S.-North Korean relations made by U.S. envoy William Perry on a rare visit last month to Pyongyang, a Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung defended his policy of engaging North Korea, saying that engagement with communism has been more successful historically than confrontation.
"It is the nature of a Communist regime -- if you try to pressure it or push it into a corner, the stronger it will become," Kim said in an interview published in The Washington Post.