SEOUL? The US special envoy on North Korea was due in Seoul on Sunday before heading to Pyongyang to try to persuade the communist regime to return to stalled nuclear disarmament talks.
Stephen Bosworth will be holding the first direct talks with the North under the administration of US President Barack Obama, but analysts and the envoy himself have played down hopes of a breakthrough in the decades-old dispute.
Bosworth is due to have consultations on Monday with South Korean officials, including chief nuclear negotiator Wi Sung-Lac, ahead of his three-day trip to North Korea starting on Tuesday.
The tortuous talks grouping the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan began in 2003. Apparent breakthroughs have alternated with breakdowns as each side accuses the other of bad faith.
In April the North quit the talks. It staged its second nuclear test the following month and followed up with a series of missile launches.
But after months of sabre rattling, North Korea told visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in October it is ready to return to the six-party talks -- if the two-way discussions with the United States prove satisfactory.
Hopes of major progress this week are nevertheless low.
"I don't expect much from the first visit to the North," Bosworth himself was quoted as telling South Korea's Yonhap news agency in London Thursday.
Bosworth is expected to meet Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju during his three-day trip to Pyongyang. He will then brief officials in Seoul on Thursday, in Beijing on Friday, in Tokyo on Saturday and in Moscow on Sunday, South Korean officials said.
But Pyongyan and Washington remain at odds over what they should talk about.
Choson Sinbo, a daily for ethnic North Koreans in Japan and Pyongyang's unofficial mouthpiece, has said the US envoy's trip should focus on "establishing a peace regime" on the Korean peninsula.
The North insists it must keep its nuclear arsenal because of US "hostility". It maintains that a peace deal with Washington formally ending the 1950-53 war is key to resolving the nuclear impasse.
The United States is wary of efforts to split the negotiating partners and says this week's visit will focus only on reviving the six-party process.
"The North is seeking bilateral talks with the US but our goal is to reactivate the multilateral talks," Yonhap quoted Bosworth as saying.
South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan said Wednesday the North's planned discussions of a peace treaty was "aimed at buying time and continuing developing nuclear weapons".
"What North Korea wants now is a peace treaty with the United States but that is out of the question," Yu said, stressing any such treaty must involve the two Koreas, the United States and China.
Nam Sung-Wook, director of the Institute for National Security Strategy, said the two sides will likely have further meetings in January and February.
If Bosworth's trip bears no fruit and no agreement for additional dialogue is reached, he told Yonhap news agency, tensions will again run high and the Noerth might stage a third nuclear experiment.
At the talks in September 2005 the North agreed to give up its nuclear programmes in exchange for major aid, diplomatic ties with Washington and Tokyo and a permanent peace pact on the peninsula.
But talks broke down as Washington tightened financial sanctions on Pyongyang, which staged its first nuclear test the following year.
After a new deal in 2007 the North shut down the plants which produced weapons-grade plutonium.
In April this year, angry at international condemnation of its long-range rocket launch, it declared the six-party process "dead" and began restoring the plants.
