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''ASEAN is just happy that the tension has lessened and we hope that this encounter here at the ASEAN Regional Forum will allow the six-party talk members to feel easy with each other and feel more comfortable and consolidate their progress,'' Ong told reporters.

     The 26-member ARF is the lone multilateral security forum in the Asia-Pacific region that involves North Korea, though that country has been engaged in separate denuclearization talks with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

     North Korea's nuclear program has been a thorny issue for ARF. The last ARF meeting, held in July 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, was especially tense as it took place in the wake of North Korea's test-firing of seven missiles, including a long-range one, and at a time when Pyongyang was refusing to return to the six-party talks until Washington lifted sanctions it had imposed on a Macao-based bank where North Korean accounts had been frozen.

     North Korea's then Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun, angered at plans to have his country's nuclear and missile programs subjected to scrutiny, boycotted a 10-nation session on Northeast Asian security that was held on the sidelines of that ARF meeting. But last month, the nuclear issue moved a step toward resolution, with North Korea closing down and sealing its nuclear facilities and inviting inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency back into the country under a Feb.13 six-party deal.

Ong expressed hope that representatives of the six nations involved in the North Korean denuclearization process can talk on the sidelines of the ARF meeting even in the absence of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who will skip this year's forum. 

Now that tangible progress has been achieved on resolving the North Korean nuclear issue, he said, the ARF is now ready to take up the issue of humanitarian concerns in North Korea.

Still, he said, ARF members ''are not sure what the North Korean government would want others to do.'' 

The ARF, founded in 1994, groups ASEAN's 10 members -- Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam -- plus Australia, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, the United States, Russia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Pakistan, North and South Korea, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Japan, China and India. Sri Lanka will become the 27th member on Wednesday.//Kyodo News