TOKYO: The peace process between the United States and North Korea was in crisis Sunday after Pyongyang angrily rejected Washington’s “gangster-like” demand for rapid nuclear disarmament, despite two days of intense talks.

When US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew out of Pyongyang after negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s right-hand Kim Yong Chol man he tried to appear positive, insisting progress had been made.

But as he arrived in Tokyo to brief his Japanese and South Korean counterparts, his North Korean hosts issued an angry statement rejecting his efforts and appealing to US President Donald Trump to revive the peace process.

Speaking privately, US officials suggested the North Korean statement was a negotiating tactic. But after two days of theatrical amity in Pyongyang it appeared to mark a return to the North’s traditional hardline position. The North’s foreign ministry took exception to Pompeo’s effort to secure concrete commitments to back Kim’s promise, made at a summit last month with US President Donald Trump, to work towards the “denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.

And it did so in stark terms, according to a statement relayed by the KCNA state news agency. “The US is fatally mistaken if it went to the extent of regarding that the DPRK would be compelled to accept, out of its patience, demands reflecting its gangster-like mindset,” the statement said, referring to North Korea by its official initials.

Pyongyang noted that it had alrady destroyed a nuclear test site — a concession that Trump has already publicy hailed as a victory for peace — and lamented that Pompeo had proved unwilling to match this with US concessions.

It dismissed Trump’s unilateral order to suspend joint US and South Korean war games as a cosmetic and “highly reversible” concession and criticised US negotiators who “never mentioned” the subject of bringing the 1953 Korean War to a a formal end with a peace treaty.—AFP