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The Pyongyang puzzle: By whim or design?
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING -
The political zig-zags taken by the North Korean
government are signs of weakness, but it remains unclear
whether this weakness is the result of a domestic power
struggle or simple miscalculations by Pyongyang's Dear
Leader, Kim Jong-il. Even by the standards of North
Korea, with its illustrious record of weird behavior,
Pyongyang has been acting very strangely ever since
October, when it stunned its American guests by
admitting that it had a nuclear-weapons program.
In the past couple of weeks North Korea has sent
many contradictory signals to the outside world. It
kicked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
inspectors out of the country on New Year's Eve but
opened up to dialogue with the United States on January
3 at a news conference in Beijing without raising any
preconditions. The day after, however, North Korea added
a demand to its offer of direct talks - now it wanted a
non-aggression pact to defuse the crisis. Washington
rejected the idea, saying it would not reward bad
behavior. In the meantime diplomats were fretting around
and the South Koreans tried to broker a deal whereby
Pyongyang would honor its nuclear commitments in
exchange for the United States' resumption of oil
deliveries. So on Thursday this week Pyongyang ate its
demands about direct talks with the US and informed the
South it was ready to reopen a cabinet-level dialogue
with Seoul and would send a delegation on January 21.
The talks with South Korea could mark a
substantial U-turn away from nuclear saber-rattling and
allow us to say happily that we are back to Square 1,
where we were before all this started in October: North
Korea is once more begging the outside world for help.
During this time, however, Pyongyang has proved once
more that it is unpredictable and thus difficult to deal
with, and even fewer people are willing to talk to it -
a net loss for Pyongyang. There is nothing new under the
sun, but the question is, Who designed this strategy?
Was it the reclusive, shady Kim Jong-il, or have all the
sudden turns been responses to an internal power
struggle among different factions in Pyongyang?
Anyway, North Korea is back on track and one
thing has been made clear by all these U turns.
Pyongyang wants to count more in the world scene, but
there are no atomic short-cuts to achieve that -
economics are what provide real leverage in today's
world. However, North Korea's economy is doing badly and
even if reforms were enacted more thoroughly than at
present, they would still take years to give Pyongyang
the economic muscle it dreams of. There is still the
possibility of the leverage provided by a road and
railway through North Korea linking South Korea and
Japan with the Chinese Northeast. If Pyongyang were to
have such transportation links, it would have a major
bargaining chip for talking with its neighbors, and
could gain substantial revenue out of it. A decision
concerning a transportation corridor could be a major
breakthrough in the coming talks in Seoul. But as
Pyongyang has proved so volatile in the past few days,
its neighbors could be forgiven for being concerned
about giving this token of trust to North Korea. How
would Kim play with the transportation corridor? Would
he close it every other day to extort some new
concessions? Yet China and South Korea, North Korea's
closest neighbors, seem to believe that it is important
to pave this road.
Still, the current nuclear
mess might merely be due to the extreme isolation of
Pyongyang and its leaders, who perhaps think along lines
much simpler than we might believe. As people in Beijing
and Seoul tend to believe that Kim is an absolute
monarch, the recent zig-zags may be due to his personal
whims.
A couple of years ago Western
intelligence discovered in Rome that North Korean
intelligence agents were busily buying kitchen utensils
and microwave ovens. The Western agents became
suspicious and investigated the matter. They found out
that some parts of microwaves oven could be used to
build triggers for atomic bombs. They thus thought that
the North Koreans were about to build an atomic bomb and
were purchasing the components of its trigger in the
form of innocuous kitchenware. They were about to act
and stop the traffic, when they came across another
piece of information: The utensils were connected with
some Italian chefs hired to go and cook for a period of
time in Pyongyang at Kim Jong-il's court. So the Western
agents dropped the matter - apparently Kim was simply
fond of Italian food. Perhaps he is fonder of pizza than
of atomic bombs.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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