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Talk to Pyongyang now, US
told
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
The administration of US President George W Bush should
immediately agree to bilateral negotiations to dismantle
North Korea's nuclear program in return for US security
guarantees and normalized relations, a blue-ribbon task
force of Korea specialists said on Tuesday.
Only
one precondition should be satisfied for engaging in
such negotiations, according to the 28 members of a
Korea task force: Pyongyang should commit itself not to
reprocess any of the 8,000 fuel rods that are believed
to remain in a storage pond at the North's Yongbyon
nuclear reactor into plutonium, a key element in the
construction of nuclear bombs.
The panel
includes top officials of the administrations of former
presidents Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush and Bill
Clinton.
Convened by the Washington-based Center
for International Policy (CIP) and the Center for East
Asian Studies of the University of Chicago, it includes
such heavyweights as the former chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, Admiral
(Retired) William Crowe; two former US ambassadors to
South Korea, James Laney and Donald Gregg; and former
ambassador Robert Gallucci, who negotiated the 1994
Agreed Framework with North Korea that froze operations
at the Yongbyon reactor in exchange for economic
assistance and the promise of normalized relations.
"The present policy of the administration is not
working," said task-force chairman Selig Harrison of
CIP, a longtime Korea specialist. "There is no escape
from direct bilateral negotiations."
A majority
of the task force also said the United States should not
preemptively attack North Korea's nuclear facilities
under any foreseeable circumstances, while a minority
concluded that Washington should "consider" such an
attack if it obtained concrete evidence, which it was
willing to make public, that Pyongyang had transferred
fissile material to a third party.
If North
Korea rejected the precondition to freeze its Yongbyon
reactor or continued its nuclear program in defiance of
any new agreement, a strong majority of the group called
for a strategy of containment that would be carried out
with other countries in the region, particularly South
Korea, Japan, China, and Russia.
The call to
engage in bilateral talks as soon as possible, part of a
comprehensive package of recommendations by the task
force, is consistent with those being conveyed to
Secretary of State Colin Powell during his current swing
through Northeast Asia, highlighted on Tuesday by the
inauguration of South Korea's new president, Roh
Moo-hyun, who also has urged Washington to negotiate
directly with Pyongyang.
Powell, who is believed
to favor direct talks but has been stymied by hawks in
the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney's office, and
some National Security Council staff, heard the same
advice from several regional leaders on his way to
Seoul, even from the foreign minister of Australia,
which has backed Bush's hard line against Iraq. "Whether
one likes it or not - and I don't particularly like it,"
said Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on Monday, "this
will have to be resolved bilaterally." His views were
seconded in Beijing by Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao.
Since November, when North Korea admitted that
it had developed a uranium-enrichment process at a
second reactor, the Bush administration has refused to
engage in negotiations with Pyongyang until it
dismantles all of its nuclear facilities. Insisting that
the uranium-processing program violates four
international agreements signed by Pyongyang, including
the 1994 Framework Agreement, Washington insists that
any return to direct negotiations would constitute a
"reward" for unacceptable behavior.
Accordingly,
the administration has pressed North Korea's neighbors
to follow its lead by withholding aid and taking other
actions to persuade it to accede to Washington's
demands. Although Japan has generally gone along with
Bush's strategy, South Korea, China and Russia have all
but rejected it.
North Korea, on the other hand,
has said it is prepared to satisfy all of Washington's
concerns about its nuclear programs, but only if the
administration enters into negotiations for a mutual
non-aggression treaty, a formal recognition of North
Korea's sovereignty, and a pledge not to obstruct
Pyongyang's economic development by denying it access to
loans from international financial institutions such as
the World Bank.
Powell and the State Department
have suggested over the past six weeks that the United
States is probably willing to strike such a deal and
have even proposed that they would be willing to meet
informally with the North Koreans in the context of a
larger, multilateral framework that would include North
Korea's neighbors.
But they have clearly not
been able to prevail on Bush himself to drop the demand
that North Korea first dismantle its reactors. That, as
well as offhand threats by Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld and other senior officials, has fueled North
Korea's concern that the United States intends to attack
it.
"They fear that they are next after Iraq,"
said Harrison, who added that US demands that this be
taken up in a multilateral framework make little sense.
"Their fear can only be addressed by the United States,"
he noted, adding that Powell's Asian interlocutors
conveyed much the same message this week, presumably Roh
himself, whose advisors increasingly have suggested to
US reporters that Washington's failure to enter into
bilateral talks risks increasing anti-American feelings
in South Korea and even the future of the US-South
Korean defense treaty.
In its report, the task
force, which also included many of the United States'
top academic specialists on Korea, warned of the same
risks and stressed that Washington needs urgently to
harmonize its policies toward Pyongyang with Seoul. If
the current nuclear crisis can be defused, the task
force said, Washington should lower its military profile
in South Korea by offering to reduce and relocate its
38,000 troops there and provide greater autonomy for
South Korean forces in the US-South Korean joint
command.
It also called for a gradual shift from
the existing US "tripwire" strategy in which US forces
would be automatically drawn into any new North-South
conflict to a new role that would give Washington
greater flexibility over whether to become involved.
It also called for a resumption of negotiations
with North Korea to reconfirm its 1998 moratorium on
missile testing and end its development of long-range
missiles.
(Inter Press Service)
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