C. Hill to Reporters upon Arrival at Hotel Okura

Comments to Reporters upon Arrival at Hotel Okura

Christopher Hill
Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Hotel Okura
Tokyo, Japan
January 20, 2007

QUESTION: [inaudible] talks with your counterpart in Berlin. How was talks? It seems like there was some compromise with the talks in Berlin.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: First of all, the negotiation takes part in the six parties. So what I did in Berlin is to have a discussion with my DPRK counterpart, focused on the need to make progress in the next Six-Party meeting. So this was something I had talked about with Ken Sasae, my Japanese counterpart, when we met together in Washington a couple of weeks ago. We decided I would go ahead, have this meeting with Mr. Kim, who was by coincidence going to be in Berlin at the same time, and weÂ’d talk about the way forward, and then I'd come here to Tokyo and brief the Japanese government. So essentially it was, I think, a useful discussion. We discussed a lot of the specific issues that are there, and we agreed that we should get to the next Six-Party round very soon.

So that's where we are, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to talk to Mr. Sasae, probably in a few minutes, when I'm able to check into the hotel. So I'll talk to you later.

QUESTION: Was there anything about the sanctions?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I don't want to go into the specific things that we talked about. We just had a very useful discussion. OK, bye-bye.

Released on January 20, 2007

ENDS

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