See no evil: US-North Korea
report By David Scofield
A recent report by a distinguished US task force says
the United States should use incentives, not bludgeons,
in dealing with North Korea in order to defuse the
nuclear crisis and persuade Pyongyang to dismantle
its nuclear-weapons program permanently. The panel, however, got it
wrong and put faith in the duplicitous North Korean
regime. It should have been listening to the North
Korean refugees who fled the "worker's paradise" before
it pontificated to the United States about the wisdom of
using carrots, not sticks. It's the latest case of "see
no evil" when it comes to North Korea.
True to form, North Korea is edging
away from its pledge to participate in the fourth round
of the six-party talks. The North Korean Foreign
Ministry declared through the state-run Rodong Shinmun
that "psychological" campaigns of misinformation
perpetuated by the United States are deliberate attempts
to undermine North Korea by creating the perception that
the nation is in chaos. This being North Korea's
raison du jour
for reneging on its
commitment. Perhaps more oil, cash and another glass
factory built at China's expense (widely reported
preconditions to North Korea's attendance at the last
three meetings) will prompt Pyongyang to honor that
which it already has promised so many times before. Or
at least it might compel participation for the short
term until another opportunity presents itself for North
Korea to blackmail the region into paying still more for
what the North was supposedly bound to do more than a
decade ago - dismantle its nuclear program.
The
North Koreans are nothing if not consistent, as they have
reneged on every nuclear agreement entered into over the
past 15 years, and not just with the United States. The
1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the
Korean Peninsula was signed by North Korea and South
Korea. Of course, we now know North Korea was violating
that agreement virtually before the ink was dry.
But beyond secret nuclear-weapons labs and the
obvious proliferation threat posed by those so
indifferent to the plight of others, it is dangerously
naive to believe that the current leadership in North
Korea, those who have consistently demonstrated their
will to exploit and break agreements in pursuit of power
and position for the ruling clique, can or should be
accepted as partners in yet more agreements. The
depravity of the leadership in North Korea is difficult
to describe, and for those who have not lived on the
Korean Peninsula, it is impossible to fathom.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il made
the strategic decision to allow the deaths of more than
a million (perhaps as many as 3 million) citizens over
the past decade while channeling hundreds of millions
of dollars to clandestine nuclear-weapons programs. These
programs are estimated to cost about US$200 million to
$250 million a year, the same amount, coincidentally,
that the United Nations' World Food Program (WFP) and
its Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) spend each
year trying to stave off famine and starvation and feed
those whom Kim Jong-il deems unworthy of sustenance and
life.
The inhumanity documented and regularly
recalled by the thousands who have escaped North Korea
trumps any hope of successful, binding disarmament
agreements with these tyrants. Indeed, far away from
recent meetings in Washington, Chicago and Toronto,
where comfortable, well-fed academics and former
politicians and bureaucrats sought to craft still more
generous offers and inducements for the Pyongyang
regime, North Korean refugees in Seoul conclude, when
anyone bothers to speak with them, that Dear Leader Kim
is incapable and unwilling to change - these voices of
experience have been excluded from a policy process
taking place thousands of kilometers away.
Supporters of still more deals
with the present North Korea leadership, those who have
invested so much of their career capital portraying
the North as a misunderstood, insecure nation - a
hair's breadth from being a functional state if
only more and greater inducements, incentives and bribes were on offer
- have hit upon the solution. According to the
Task Force on US Korea Policy, a veritable who's
who of Clinton-era policy wonks, including the
architects of the now defunct 1994 Agreed Framework
and academics sympathetic to North Korea's view, the United
States and the world community should simply return to
an agreement strikingly similar to one Pyongyang has already violated
since it was signed in 1994. The panel's recent
recommendations did not make mention of the more than 6
million people still hungry and malnourished in North
Korea.
This "rational" path forward espoused by
the task force is constructed by carefully avoiding the
grisly truths of North Korea in its analysis. The panel
did not emphasize, for example, that 36% of the
population, more than 8 million people, in 2000-02
faced hunger, despite the country's running a current
account deficit of more than a billion dollars a year at
the time - the highest in more than a decade. No mention
was made of a leadership that starves its people, not as
an unavoidable consequence of state penury, but because
it was and is politically expedient to promote
privation, pestilence and starvation in a bid to further
enrich the elite. And it is with this group we are told
more deals should be done.
As Nicholas Eberstadt
indicated in a recent article he penned for Policy
Review, "The persistence of North Korea", statistical
analysis of the nation's current account indicates a
very sharp increase in imports over exports beginning in
1998, the same year South Korea president Kim Dae-jung
began very generous policies of reconciliation with
North Korea predicated on economic inducements that, in
his words, were not shackled by the conditions of
reciprocity. Financial inducements included the $500
million sent directly to Kim Jong-il to persuade him to
agree to the two-day summit with Kim Dae-jung in 2000,
economic projects crafted to maximize benefits to North
Korea's rulers including the $1 billion paid over the
past six years by Hyundai Asan to the North Korean
leadership for the privilege of running tours to Kumgang
mountain - all while demanding nothing in return.
Indeed, last Thursday Hyundai Merchant Marine,
the de facto holding company for the Hyundai group and
corporate conduit for at least $200 million of the $500
million that was sent from South Korea to Kim Jong-il
before the 2000 summit, was found to have cooked the
books in 2000 to the tune of $1.2 billion. This sparked
speculation that the company may have sent far more than
the $200 million previously proven, supporting rumors
that the 2000 payoff was far greater than the $500
million admitted to.
In addition to
South Korea's cash without conditions, North Korea's
illicit activities began paying huge dividends around the
same time. North Korea's missile sales swelled to about
$500 million a year, and the proliferation of drugs,
according to US estimates, may inject the same amount
again into Kim Jong-il's pockets. In 2002, Japanese
authorities confiscated approximately 1,100 kilograms of
methamphetamine originating from North Korea,
representing one-third of total seizures; in China
1,300kg, or 38% of all methamphetamine seized originated
from North Korea. In April last year the Pong Su, a
North Korean-flagged freighter, was interdicted
attempting to smuggle heroin into Australia.
And
last week, two North Korean diplomats were detained in
Turkey after being found to be in possession of "large
amounts" of methamphetamine. This does not take into
account the millions of dollars generated through the
proliferation of counterfeit currency from North Korea.
US Central Intelligence Agency estimates put Kim's personal
wealth at about $4 billion. It all begs the question of
just how many millions of people would Kim Jong-il have
to allow to die before those who believe in the
rationality of more negotiations with him concede that
just because it is the administration of President
George W Bush describing North Korea as a den of
depravity controlled by a cabal callously indifferent to
the hardship of their people, does not necessarily make
it untrue. The report released last week by the Task
Force on US Korea Policy, chaired by Dr Selig Harrison,
director of the Asia program at the Center for
International Policy, advocates a return to the past
for, as Harrison asserts in a follow-up article written
for Foreign Affairs (January-February 2005), North Korea
stuck to the 1994 Agreed Framework "scrupulously". The
four-point proposal advocated by the task force requires
North Korea only to address the plutonium issue.
In return, Pyongyang would receive largess from
the region and the United States far beyond anything
hitherto offered - diplomatic recognition, liaison
offices and then full diplomatic relations, access to
Asia Development Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and World Bank funds - despite the North having
defaulted on $10 billion in loans it secured from both
communist and free-market countries through the 1970s
and 80s. Harrison, it seems, is convinced that the
highly enriched uranium (HEU) program does not exist,
and it is not mentioned until the final stage of the
proposed agreement. Only after North Korea has been
fully appeased and the world lauds the leadership with
the respect Harrison believes it deserves, will the
issue of the previously processed plutonium (pre-1994),
special International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
inspections, HEU weapons program, human rights and other
sundries be broached.
Of course,
even then-US president Bill Clinton seemed less than convinced of
North Korea's nuclear transparency when, in March 2000,
he refused to sign a waiver declaring that Pyongyang was
not attempting to manufacture nuclear weapons material
from uranium, a point not mentioned by either the task
force or Harrison, in their apparent quest to make US
tough line on the North Korea nuclear issue another
"neo-con" adventure.
The
evidence concerning an HEU project in North Korea began to
appear soon after the 1994 agreement was signed.
The subsequent detention of Pakistan's nuclear godfather Dr A Q
Khan has shed light on how Pyongyang sought Pakistani HEU
technology and equipment, an illicit trade predicated on an
already burgeoning missile proliferation relationship
between the two nations. North Korea has long been supplying
its No-Dong missiles to Pakistan. Concerns were voiced
at the highest levels of the Clinton administration of
the strong possibility that Kim Jong-il was looking to
deal away - for huge rewards - a plutonium weapons
program that might no longer be the centerpiece of his
nuclear-weapons strategy. All the while keeping the real HEU
weapons threat hidden (North Korea's domestic uranium
mines and the fact that uranium is enriched without a
nuclear reaction, thus negating the need for a reactor
complex, makes the program far easier to conceal than a
plutonium-based weapons program) and out of the scope of
negotiations. Indeed, the original planners in 1994
concede that they believed the North Korean regime would
soon collapse and they never expected to have to follow
through on their promises to a leadership that most
understood to be vile and dangerous.
Undaunted,
those like Harrison ardently believe that the only way
forward is a return to the past, perennial perfidy and
the million or millions dead from a politically induced
famine not withstanding. Indeed, Harrison went one step
further in his recent article and argued that the Bush
administration had misread the facts concerning North
Korea's nuclear intentions. And how did he support this
assertion? In his words, "The Bush administration
presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible
truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea
(much as it did on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the
danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based
nuclear weapons." A damning assertion to be sure, but
where's the evidence? "This failure to distinguish
between civilian and military uranium-enrichment
capabilities ..." Hold on. Now he is saying uranium
enrichment may be going on clandestinely, but it's
probably for civilian purposes.
Of course,
he does not adequately explain just what the
civilian purpose might be, as North Korea only has one very
small five-megawatt reactor, and it is designed not to bring
light to the dark nation, but to produce plutonium.
Further, the fact that North Korea is prohibited from
enriching uranium under the 1994 agreement, even if it
is for civilian purposes, is conveniently brushed aside
as this amounts to a "technical" violation". Small
wonder North Korea does not abide by its promises and
agreements with so many ready to step up and defend the
country's obfuscating rulers.
Harrison went on
to assert that the United States misunderstood North
Korea when Pyongyang officials admitted to James Kelly,
assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific
Affairs, in October 2002 that they have an HEU program.
Apparently, according to Harrison, who was not there,
Kelly's delegation mistranslated the words of first
deputy foreign minister Kang Sok-ju. They didn't say
they have it, Harrison maintained, but they have the
right to have it. This subtle nuance was apparently
missed by Kelly's delegation, despite the fact that
Kelly's team was composed of three translators
(according to a United Kingdom diplomat who was in
Pyongyang at the time and met with the team), including
two ethnic Koreans and one from the US.
Roughly
speaking, there are those who calculate success based
strictly on agreements and signatures, regardless or
whether those agreements will ever be honored. And there
are those who believe that negotiating with those who
have no intention of keeping their word is redundant and
a potentially very dangerous exercise. For decades the
North Korean regime has publicly declared its
priorities, yet few seem ready to listen. They have
indicated through word and deed the state's primary
objective of regime stability and security - priority
one. All other issues, they have made known, shall be
weighed against this priority. Agreements, contracts and
promises are malleable and can be manipulated to fit the
needs of a very narrow leadership group at the top of
the North Korean pyramid.
Those who were lucky
enough to escape the inhumanity of North Korea voice a
consistent refrain: the North Korean leadership is
incapable of change, inducements and aid act as pillars
of support, strengthening the rule of the despots as
witnessed by those who suffered there. To further
appease and placate may be the easiest policy to follow,
but aside from the inherent danger of giving more to
these criminals, where is the justice for those millions
of North Koreans who live emaciated and fearful, those
who have witnessed the privations of the system and the
inhumanity it perpetuates first hand? Justice sacrificed
for political expedience. See no evil.
David Scofield, former lecturer at the
Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee
University, is currently conducting post-graduate
research at the School of East Asian Studies, University
of Sheffield, United Kingdom.
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2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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