| |
Uncertainties loom over North Korea
talks
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- While heartened by the announcement of talks among
North Korea, the United States and China in Beijing next
week, specialists here are worried that the US
government may be unwilling to make concessions
necessary to sustain a longer negotiation process that
would defuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Boosted by its convincing military victory in
Iraq, the administration of President George W Bush may
stick to its long-standing demand that North Korea
dismantle its nuclear programs as a precondition for US
assurances that it will not attack the communist state,
according to the analysts.
"I see no indications
that the US is ready for any quid pro quos," said Korea
expert Selig Harrison, who headed a blue-ribbon task
force that called in late February for Washington
urgently to engage Pyongyang on dismantling its nuclear
program in return for such assurances. "I think the
administration sees [the talks] as a way of putting more
pressure on North Korea."
The administration
remains badly divided over what its negotiation position
should be, with hawks, based primarily in the Pentagon
and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, arguing against
concessions, and the State Department favoring
flexibility.
"There are still conflicts within
the administration about what to give the North
Koreans," said Donald Gregg, a former US ambassador to
South Korea who also served as then vice president
George H W Bush's national security advisor. The
best-case scenario for next week's meeting, added Gregg,
would be "an amicable agreement to keep talking".
Pyongyang's decision to drop its insistence on
holding strictly bilateral talks with the United States
is being interpreted by some administration officials
here as vindicating their hard line and as a sign that
the regime, one-third of President Bush's "axis of
evil", is ready to give in to Washington's demands in
light of its military victory in Iraq.
"I think
that people have got to know that we are serious about
stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction,"
Bush himself said on Sunday when asked whether North
Korea's announcement was motivated by Washington's
military success.
While most analysts believe
that the US victory over Baghdad played a role in North
Korea's policy change, they also insist that other
factors, particularly pressure from China and to a
lesser extent Russia, may have been more decisive in
getting Pyongyang to soften its conditions.
"The
people we have to thank for this are largely the
Chinese, because they engineered this by persuading the
North Koreans to back off a little," said Don
Oberdorfer, a Korea specialist at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies, who visited
Pyongyang in November.
"I think the Chinese said
to the North Koreans [even before the Iraq war] that
things were getting out hand and 'won't be in your
national interest or ours to have a deepening crisis on
the Korean Peninsula with the Americans'."
Referring to a three-day interruption of oil
deliveries from China to North Korea in late February,
which Beijing officially blamed on technical problems,
Gregg said, "Cutting off the oil was a very powerful
signal."
Next week's talks are designed to
defuse a six-month-old crisis that began last October
when, in the first high-level negotiation between North
Korea and the Bush administration, assistant secretary
of state for Asia James Kelly went to Pyongyang to
demand that it immediately and verifiably dismantle a
secret highly enriched uranium (HEU) program to develop
nuclear weapons.
In Washington's view, the
program violated a number of international agreements,
including the 1994 Framework Agreement with the United
States that required North Korea to freeze its Yongbyon
plutonium plant in exchange for deliveries of heating
oil and the construction of two light-water nuclear
reactors by Japan and South Korea.
The
administration said it would not engage in any further
bilateral talks with Pyongyang on its demands for
security guarantees or any other subject until all of
its nuclear programs were dismantled.
But North
Korea escalated the crisis, first by expelling
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who
monitored the Yongbyon plant, then by announcing its
withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT), and finally by restarting the Yongbyon plant.
It also threatened to begin reprocessing the
8,000 spent fuel rods that were stored at the plant and
to end a unilateral moratorium on testing of its
long-range missiles. Early this year, it tried to force
down a US spy plane.
While Washington insisted
it would not invade North Korea and was willing to meet
in the context of multilateral regional security talks,
senior officials also hinted at possible military
strikes against Yongbyon or an interdiction operation if
they became convinced that North Korea was on the verge
of producing or exporting nuclear bombs. The Pentagon
even deployed long-range bombers to positions where they
could strike North Korean targets at any moment.
In this context, the announcement of next week's
meeting is seen as a potential breakthrough for which
the United States has also made concessions.
"The Korean position dropped its previous
insistence to sit down only with the US, but I would
argue that the US position has changed, too, at least
with regard to its definition of 'multilateral', by
which it originally meant a larger group," including
South Korea, Japan, and Russia, said Alan Romberg, a
retired State Department expert on Northeast Asia
currently with the Henry L Stimson Center in Washington.
But that the two sides have agreed to a
framework for talks hardly means that progress is
certain, particularly if Washington insists that
Pyongyang dismantle its nuclear programs as a
precondition for further talks or Pyongyang insists that
it will do so only if it receives security assurances
from Washington.
"If Kelly says the same thing
all over again, then we'd be in worse shape than we were
before," said Harrison, who added that he thinks recent
back-channel exchanges between the parties make it
unlikely that the October meeting will be repeated.
"This is going to be a very difficult process,"
said Romberg, who noted that just arranging verification
measures for dismantling North Korea's HEU program,
whose location Washington has not even identified,
promises to be a major challenge.
China's role
is key, according to analysts. "This is the first really
substantive joint venture between the Bush
administration and the fourth-generation leadership in
China. They have totally changed their policies from
saying they don't have much influence over North Korea,"
Gregg said, noting that Beijing is "taking
responsibility in ways it never did before".
Oberdorfer also highlighted China's role,
insisting that Beijing sees as its central objective
"not to have a crisis in the Korean Peninsula". Just as
it has put pressure on Pyongyang to agree to a modified
bilateral framework, he noted, it also prevented the US
from having the United Nations Security Council condemn
North Korea for withdrawing from the NPT last week.
"My hope [for progress] is made greater by the
fact that the Chinese are the interlocutors," Oberdorfer
added. "They are very sophisticated in terms of such
negotiations, and they don't want to sponsor a train
wreck."
(Inter Press Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
