With presidential elections looming in November, the Bush administration has successfully managed to keep the North Korean issue on the backburner and that is the way it wants it to stay, analysts say.

The problem is that the other nations involved in the six-party format are getting restless, and splinters could appear in the talks starting in Beijing on Wednesday and scheduled to run until Saturday.

"If North Korea rises to a level of importance, Bush could be in a position where he has to concede, but there is no evidence the administration is ready to concede," said Paul Harris, an expert on US foreign policy at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

"If North Korea already has nuclear weapons and is exporting this kind of technology, then this becomes a bigger threat, a bigger threat than Saddam.

"If this idea gains traction and becomes bigger news, then the US will have to respond. So they want to keep it at a low level."

Two previous rounds of six-way talks hosted by China and also involving Japan, Russia and South Korea, have failed to narrow key differences on how to end the 20-month-old stand-off.

The impasse blew up in October 2002 when Washington said the Stalinist state had broken a 1994 nuclear freeze by launching a secret nuclear weapons program.

Washington is demanding the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the programs, both plutonium and enriched uranium, before it will offer concessions to the impoverished state.

Pyongyang denies that it is running a uranium scheme, but has offered to freeze its plutonium facilities in return for simultaneous rewards from the United States.

Since the last round of talks in February, reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has met face to face with counterparts from two of the participating nations -- President Hu Jintao of China and Japanese President Junichiro Koizumi.

Reports last week said he would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in July.

On a secretive trip to China in April, Kim reaffirmed his commitment to the talks process but also made clear there could be no progress until the US changed its "hostile" policy.

Koizumi, meanwhile, returned from a rare visit to Pyongyang on May 22 saying that Kim had pledged to work for a solution to the festering standoff.

While the talks are going ahead, there is little optimism that progress can be made.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell stressed as recently as last month that all the five parties talking to North Korea were united in their stand for it to disband its nuclear programs completely, but others disagree.

Zhao Huji, a North Korea specialist at the Central Party School in Beijing, said cracks were appearing among China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, who were losing patience with Washington.

"At the beginning, all five countries tried to persuade North Korea (to make concessions). Now, the very hard line of the United States is not supported so much by the others," he said.

"The countries close to the Korean peninsula are pushing so that things advance. Only the United States does not want this to happen."

Both Zhao and Cui Yingjiu, a leading North Korean expert at Peking University, agree that North Korea wants to make reforms and open up, but will not do so without a security guarantee from Washington, a key requirement from Pyongyang before it dismantles its nuclear program.

"Kim is pushing for reform and opening but it is coming to the point where foreigners (such as the US) are not allowing this to move forward," said Cui.

"If the US can better understand what is going on it would be easier for them to work with the other countries."

According to observers, the economic reforms Kim introduced in recent years have failed and the impoverished country is struggling to cope, with food and energy aid from the international community in short supply.

Finding a solution to the nuclear issue is closely entwined with tackling these other problems.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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