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PYONGYANG
WATCH
Setting the North Korea
agenda
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Right then. Slowly if unsurely, we make
progress. One: There will (God and Kim Jong-il willing)
be talks on the North Korean nuclear issue, any day now.
Talks are better than no talks. We breathe again.
Two: We know who's talking. It's 2 + 4: the two
Koreas, plus the four powers - the United States, China,
Japan, and Russia. As argued in our last column, that's
the right group (Who whom: A North Korean
hexagon, August 26). Everyone who should be
there will be.
Three: um, then it gets harder.
Like: what exactly will they discuss? North Korean nukes
for one thing, obviously. That alone is a knotty issue.
Yet it by no means exhausts the long list of bones,
military and more, which the world in general and these
powers in particular have to pick with Pyongyang.
Here, the US insistence on multilateral rather
than bilateral talks may backfire. A tete-a-tete
for two would have been complex enough - but with a
sextet, the permutations are endless. Sure, the other
five all agree that Kim Jong-il and his nukes (if any)
are a pain. But what to do? If Washington is counting on
five against one telling the Dear Leader to disarm, the
US in turn may get ganged up on by the other five over
the terms. Principled communist that he is, the Dear
Leader is not about to pull his pants down (a Pyongyang
metaphor, I hasten to add; see Catching Kim with his pants down,
August 6), if at all, unless the price is right. The US
mantra that it will not reward malfeasance sounds
high-toned, but is wholly unrealistic. If you want a
deal, you deal.
Elsewhere, expect less
unanimity. Five interlocutors means five agendas, which
are bound to diverge on ends, means, and priorities.
Thus Japan has already incurred North Korea's wrath -
it's easily done - by saying it wants to discuss the
abduction saga. Nearly a year after Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi's breakthrough summit with Kim
Jong-il, relations are now stalemated amid a hostility
if anything greater than before. Also, tough Japanese
port inspections (not before time) of North Korea's
rickety and often racketeering rustbucket merchant
ships, while wholly justified, are hardly calculated to
promote peace and goodwill.
Abductions: Who
cares? I mean that literally, not rhetorically. For the
US, China and Russia this is not an issue. It could be
for South Korea, which suffered more than 400 such
kidnaps (fisherfolk, mostly) in the past half-century -
plus up to 80,000 taken north during the 1950-53 Korean
War. But Seoul prefers to play this softly softly - to
the chagrin of victims' families, some of whom are suing
their government.
It's easy to hurl charges of
moral cowardice - but the real world demands tough, even
Machiavellian choices. Anyway, how do you prioritize
kidnaps against nukes? A no-brainer, surely. Abductions
are small-time nastiness; nukes are a global mass
menace. Each of North Korea's dialogue partners must set
parameters and priorities, or talks would never get off
the ground at all. Yet a multilateral format makes it
unlikely that five different lists of the top 10 North
Korean concerns will all read the same.
Those
concerns themselves make an all but impossibly long
menu. (For Pyongyang's unsurpassed full a la
carte of roguery, see a couple of columns from last
year - nope, nothing's changed, except for the worse: A rogue by any other name, May
25, 2002, and A menace at home and abroad, May 31,
2002.)
Top of the list, of course, are weapons
of mass destruction (WMD). Within that category, the
priority is nukes. Two separate programs: plutonium at
Yongbyon, and perhaps now elsewhere too; plus highly
enriched uranium (HEU), which could be all over the
shop. Maybe two to four bombs already, from plutonium
extracted a decade ago - plus spent fuel rods
reprocessed this year, with fresh rods in the pipeline
to make the next batch. And what about the new
light-water reactors still being slowly built by the
Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization
consortium under the 1994 Agreed Framework? Many in the
administration of US President George W Bush want to
kill KEDO, yet China sees the AF as the model for a new
settlement. Plenty to discuss there, in a mere three
days.
And that's just for starters. Still on
WMD, chemical or biological weapons (CBW) haven't even
begun to be addressed yet. Relatedly, and urgently,
there are missiles - research, testing, deployment, and
(especially, these days) proliferation. Bush's
predecessor, Bill Clinton, was halfway to a missile
deal, but time ran out with no agreement on the vital
issue of verification. Bush chose not to continue this:
he seems to think stopping shipments on the high seas is
a better idea, in his new Proliferation Security
Initiative (PSI). Will that work? North Korea now sends
missiles to Iran by plane. Shoot 'em down over China,
you reckon?
But WMD doesn't exhaust the security
issues. Next up come conventional forces: the massive
1.1 million-strong Korean People's Army (KPA) and its
offensive forward deployment. Plus the world's largest
special forces, 100,000 strong, whose sole (Seoul?)
raison d'etre is aggressive. Terrorism? North
Korea is still on the US list, but for nothing recent.
It could have gotten off, had it tried, thus opening the
way to World Bank and International Monetary Fund
membership and loans. That it didn't even bother trying
is kind of discouraging.
The list goes on.
Kidnaps we mentioned already. Marine provocations: spy
subs washed up on South Korean beaches; border
violations and firefights over crab in the Yellow Sea; a
spy ship (probably drug-running) hunted and sunk by
Japan, which later raised it: it's now a big tourist
attraction. Missile sales may be legal; but landing a
US$125 million stash of heroin in Australia is something
else, as are forging and passing counterfeit dollars.
With dozens of busts by now, this isn't hostile
propaganda: it's hard fact.
We're not done yet.
Fugees, anyone? Still there - meaning hiding in a
disgraceful China, which refuses them any rights and
repatriates all it catches. Might Hu Jintao threaten to
be nicer to refugees, as a way to put pressure on Kim
Jong-il? Then there are all the internal human-rights
(as if!) issues: freedom of speech (not) and of worship
(double-not), the ghastly 200,000-strong gulag, the
wholly avoidable famine from which not even loyal party
members were safe. The very land, eroded and polluted,
cries out too.
With a record like that, where do
you start? Three days in Beijing can barely scratch the
surface. But the dilemma is this. To do what's urgent
first, and keep it manageable, should the agenda stick
strictly to nukes? Or should the multiple yet
interlinked other facets of the North Korean question be
at least flagged up from the start as well? The aim
being to stop Pyongyang endlessly making trouble on one
issue after another - and each time coming back for
more, palm out, in the old beggar-mugger routine. To
avoid that, ad nauseam and infinitum, needs a definitive
solution: the mother of all package deals.
Some
in Washington think the only final solution (to coin a
phrase) is regime change. Nice work if you could do it;
but the risks are huge, and it's not the US that's in
the front line. Ousting Kim Jong-il is not an option
without China onside, and that day is not yet here
(though the Dear Leader is working on it ...).
So for now, best stick to nukes for starters,
and negotiate with North Korea as is. Yet even if Bush
can get suppress his visceral loathing enough to embrace
Kim Jong-il (even as metaphor, that boggles the mind),
could the Dear Leader ever not suspect this hug is meant
to stifle him? And would he be wrong?
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior
research fellow in sociology and modern Korea, Leeds
University, England.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
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